Going postal

How do you know things are getting back to normal in America? Two mass shootings in a week

Covid-19 has altered many things, but some, stay very much the same. 2020 saw a record sale of guns in the USA, per Mother Jones reporting of FBI data, nearly 40 million firearms were sold in 2020. 40 million. Since 2018 there have been more guns than people in the USA and it is number one in firearms per capita, with just 4% of the world’s population, the USA owns a staggering 40% of civilian-owned guns globally.

Not bad hey.

Bizarrely with all these guns comes another statistic, the U.S. is second only to Brazil in number of total gun deaths. And the U.S. ranks 20th in per capita gun deaths, with a rate of 10.6/100K people. Reporting by WMAU, American University Radio, the U.S., when compared with other wealthy nations, becomes an outlier: The gun death rate is nine times as high as Canada’s (0.47 deaths/100K people), and 29 times as high as in Denmark (0.15 deaths/100K), for example.

But we knew that already.

Whats interesting about 2020 is that the pandemic caused a massive spike in gun related incidents. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that compiles data on violence in America, reported that nearly 20,000 people were killed in 2020 because of gun-related violence—and that number does not include gun-related suicides, of which there were an additional 24,000. Mass shootings—which The Trace defines as any shooting with four or more victims—also sharply increased in 2020, up by more than 50 percent over any recent year on record.

The good news, school shootings were down in 2020. Education Week journalists, in 2018, began tracking shootings on K-12 school property that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths. That year, there were 24 such incidents. There were 25 in 2019 and only 10 such incidents in 2020.

Schools in America went back to ‘in-person’ learning last week, so it is only a matter of time, before we read about the first school shooting of 2021. Sympathies and prayers will be uttered, time will pass, and guess what, another mass shooting or mass killing will take place.

American cable news channels went back to normal too, sending reporters to the ‘scene’ which is exactly like the last one, a cornered off location with police tape (yes, just like in the movies), taking press conferences live, as a police spokesperson explains that ‘they can confirm a mass shooting took place’, and so it goes.

Why?

Because America has more guns and more semi automatic rifles. I think it is just that simple. But imagine being the parent who gets a phone call one afternoon explaining that while little Jonny was out playing in the school yard, a stray bullet hit him. In November last year at Lincoln Elementary School, Leland, NC a 6-year-old male student was shot in the jaw during recess; it was likely from a gun a great distance away. The boy survived, but as the hospital staff noted, he was very lucky.

What happens when your luck runs out?