The first six months of the year were the deadliest in the United States since 2006 in terms of mass killings, taking the country’s gun problem to a new level.
From January 1 to June 30 this year, there were 28 mass murders in the country, almost all but one involving firearms.
The death toll rises almost every week, in a constant cycle of violence and mourning.
In those 181 days, the 28 massacres resulted in 140 victims, among people killed by strangers or shot by loved ones, slaughtered in towns and cities, in their own homes or outside in broad daylight.
“What an awful milestone,” said Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were attending a private Christian school in Nashville on March 27 when a former student killed three children and three adults.
“You never think your family will be part of such a statistic,” he added.
Leatherwood, a prominent Republican in a state that has not tightened gun laws, believes something needs to be done to get guns out of the hands of people who can become violent. The shock of seeing the bloodshed so close to home made him take a stand.
A mass murder is defined as an event in which four or more people, not including the perpetrator, are killed within a 24-hour period.
A database maintained by the Associated Press (AP) and USA Today in collaboration with Northeastern University has tracked this large-scale violence since 2006.
March 2023 surpassed the previous record of 27 mass murders, which did not occur until the second half of 2022.
James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, never imagined such a thing when he began reviewing the database about five years ago.
“We used to say there were two to three dozen a year,” Fox said. “The fact that there are 28 by the middle of the year is an impressive statistic,” he added.
But the chaos of the first six months of 2023 does not automatically condemn the last six months of the year, which could be quieter.
“Maybe there will be fewer homicides by the end of 2023, or this could be part of a trend. But we won’t know for a while,” said Amy Barnhorst, a psychiatrist and associate director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the university. from California.
Experts such as Barnhorst and Fox attribute the increase in bloodshed to the increase in the gun population in the United States – a country with more individual guns than people.
Despite the unprecedented carnage, the National Rifle Association, the nation’s largest gun lobby, remains strongly opposed to the regulation of firearms, including semi-automatics.
Source: DN
