Updated Resource Details Gun Violence Crisis Amid the Pandemic
5.7.2021
Updated today by Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, Gun Violence and COVID-19 in 2020: A Year of Colliding Crises includes facts about gun violence during the pandemic, possible explanations for increases and recommended policy responses at the local, state and federal levels.
New information in this update includes:
- An estimate that total deaths from gun violence in 2020 will likely exceed 40,000, according to an Everytown analysis of data from Gun Violence Archive. This would translate to the highest rate of gun deaths in the last two decades.
- Gun homicides and non-suicide-related shootings took approximately 19,300 lives, a 25 percent increase from 2019, according to the same analysis.
- An estimate that people purchased 22 million guns in 2020, a 64 percent increase over 2019, based on the number of background checks conducted.
- Unintentional shooting deaths by children increased by over 30 percent comparing incidents in March to December of 2020 to the same months in 2019.
The report also:
- Highlights how cities are seeing historic levels of violence this year, as well as how structural inequities have put Black and Latino communities at greater risk of experiencing the effects of both COVID-19 and gun violence.
- Discusses how the shootings at spas in metro Atlanta in March, in which a gunman took eight lives—six of whom were Asian women—were a continuation of violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community that exploded throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Stop AAPI Hate, an organization tracking incidents of hate and discrimination against the AAPI community, received nearly 3,800 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents from March 2020 to February 2021. Easy access to guns makes all hate-related violence, including that against AAPI women, even deadlier.
- Notes survey data from over 40 states showing about half of domestic violence service providers surveyed were seeing an increase in gun threats toward survivors of intimate partner violence in their communities during the pandemic.