The rate of gun deaths is currently reaching levels not seen in decades, and when it comes to homicides, it is black men who are seeing the worst of it.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Gun Death Rate Nears Three-Decade High, With Men at Most RiskThe rate of gun deaths in the U.S. reached a 28-year high in 2021 after sharp increases in homicides of Black men and suicides among white men, an analysis of federal data showed.A record 48,953 deaths in the U.S., or about 15 fatalities per 100,000 people, were caused by guns last year, said the analysis published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Gun deaths declined in the 1990s, but have been rising steadily over the past decade and skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic, said researchers who conducted the analysis.Gun-related deaths of women and children have risen, the analysis said, but men remain far more likely to die from guns.“The disparities are so marked,” said Chris Rees, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.Dr. Rees and his colleagues analyzed U.S. firearm fatality rates from 1990 to 2021 using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1.1 million people in the U.S. have died from guns since 1990, the analysis showed…Since 1990, rates of gun-related homicide have been highest among Black men aged 20 to 24, the analysis said, with 142 fatalities per 100,000 people in this group in 2021—a 74% increase since 2014. Homicide rates are as much as 23 times higher among Black men and as much as nearly four times higher among Hispanic men than among white men, the analysis said.
It may not surprise you to learn that the number of deaths went up significantly during the pandemic.
Politico reported:
In the new study, the researchers examined trends in firearm deaths since 1990. They found gun deaths began to steadily increase in 2005, but the rise accelerated recently, with a 20% jump from 2019 to 2021.Why did gun deaths rise so dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic? That’s “a straightforward question with probably a complicated answer that no one really knows the answer to,” said Fleegler, an emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.Factors could include disruption of people’s work and personal lives, higher gun sales, stress, and mental health issues, experts said.The researchers counted more than 1.1 million gun deaths over those 32 years — about the same as the number of American deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the last three years.
That would also be right around when progressives started saying we needed to defund the police.
Did these black lives matter?
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