Record on gun control written in blood

Deaths from firearms in US have soared alongside pandemic, with no fix in sight

Thomas Massie, a US congressman, welcomed in the holiday season with a cheery family photo posted on social media that shows everyone holding a gun－high-grade ones by the look of them, too.

He captioned the photo: "Merry Christmas! PS. Santa, please bring ammo." The side request to Father Christmas, with the image posted on Twitter on Dec 4, apparently alludes to a shortage of bullets in the United States.

In the photo, Massie, a US Representative from Kentucky, is holding an M60 machine gun, which has been used by the US military since the 1950s. Next to him, his youngest daughter holds an Uzi submachine gun. His wife, three other children and an unidentified man each hold an assault-style rifle.

Massie, a Republican, is an ardent gun-rights advocate. He was shown waving a handgun at a rally in support of the Constitution's Second Amendment in Frankfort, Kentucky, on Jan 31, 2020.

His post came five days after a shooting at Oxford High School, outside Detroit in Michigan state, in which four students were killed and six other students and a teacher were injured. A 15-year-old student has been charged in relation to the shooting, in which a handgun was used.

"Posting this vile photo and caption just five days after four children were gunned down in school. Perhaps he should ask Santa for human decency instead. Disgusting," one user commented on Twitter.

"Depressing and heartless－to say the least," actress Mia Farrow wrote.

Guns seem to be used to resolve issues big and small in the everyday life of people in the US. A few days before the Oxford school shooting, a man in Knoxville, Tennessee, waved around an AK-47 in a pizza restaurant after he was told it would take 10 minutes to make his pepperoni pizza. A woman waiting in line ended up giving him her pizza in an attempt to get him to leave.

In 2021, the United States saw another year filled with a record number of deaths by gun violence, and it's the mass shootings that tend to spark the greatest fears among people.

Some of the mass shootings have involved feuds in which one person guns down other family members, and the various incidents count spouses, parents and children among the victims.

Mass shootings that happen at public places usually have a larger impact on the collective psyche due to their randomness and unpredictability.

The first major mass shooting of 2021 occurred days after the bell rang in the new year. On Jan 9, a man went on a shooting rampage that took place in a drugstore and a restaurant in the Chicago-Evanston area. He killed five people before being shot dead by police.

Deadliest incident

The deadliest incident of 2021 happened in Boulder, Colorado, when 10 people were killed by a gunman who in March opened fire into a grocery store from a parking lot.

Also in March, a man went on a shooting spree at three spas in the Atlanta area of Georgia and killed eight people, six of them Asian women. The incident elicited outrage and fear in the Asian-American community, which has become a target of hate crimes during the pandemic.

In April, a 19-year-old former employee killed eight people at a facility of the FedEx delivery firm in Indianapolis.

Another workplace shooting occurred in May in San Jose, California. A maintenance worker at a transit agency killed nine of his colleagues before shooting and killing himself. He was believed to have been angry about his job.

In much the same fashion with how the year began, the bloodshed inexorably continued into the tail end of the year. The shooting at Oxford High School on Nov 30, caused more parents to mourn in the US.

Prosecutors have charged the suspect's parents with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, a rare move in a shooting case.

They said the parents bought the gun for their son days before the shooting, failed to secure the weapon, and ignored obvious signs that their son was on the brink of violence.

The number of mass shootings has spiked in the past two years, keeping time with the pandemic, after steadily creeping up in the preceding years. According to the Gun Violence Archive, since 2015, the number of such killings has held above 300 each year, but jumped to 418 in 2019.

The country saw a record high of 691 mass shootings－those involving at least four victims in one incident－in 2021 as gun violence surged during the year.

According to the latest updates by Gun Violence Archive, as of Dec 31, gun violence had resulted in 44,750 deaths. Among them, 1,533 were children.

The overall number of violent gun deaths has jumped dramatically during the pandemic. Excluding cases in which guns were used in suicides, the number reached 19,480 in 2020 and 20,660 in 2021, representing increases of 26 and 34 percent, respectively, over the 15,469 gun-related deaths in 2019.

A scientific report published in October on the website of the journal Nature also confirmed that gun violence is rising. The study examined data for 13-month periods since and before March 2020.

The analysis concluded that the risk of gun violence was 30 percent higher compared with the 13-month pre-pandemic period on a national level. Significantly higher rates of gun violence were identified in 28 states.

The study pointed to increased psychological stress resulting from COVID-19 and the increase in firearm sales as possible causes for the rising gun violence in the US.

Gun purchases began soaring in early 2020. Experts cited uncertainty brought by the pandemic and nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 as the major contributing factors.

As a result, gun sales reached 23 million in 2020, according to data collected by Small Firearm Analytics. That represented an increase of 65 percent over the 13.9 million firearms sold in 2019.

The group's chief economist, Jurgen Brauer, said that despite an expected year-over-year drop in 2021, "the US firearms market continues to boom, if at a lower level than pandemic-driven 2020".

He added: "By year's end, the industry is expected to have sold about 20 million units."

A survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated that more than 3.2 million people purchased a firearm for the first time during the first half of 2021.