The United States has a violent record of gun firing by a cross-section of people and even school children are not spared where the assailants and victims are both juveniles. The exorbitant rise in gun violence in the US has been alarmingly high in the recent past – the death rate in 2021 was the highest in nearly three decades. The most chilling record is the rate among women which is growing must faster than that of men.
The increase among women, most spectacularly among Black women is playing a tragic and unexpected role in a tally overwhelmingly male-biased. The rate of firearm-related homicides among black women has more than tripled since 2010, and the rate of gun-related suicides more than doubled since 2015.
This research is one of the most comprehensive analyses of U.S. gun deaths in years, said according to the Director of Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center.
In October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data on U.S. firearm deaths last year, counting more than 47,000 — the most in at least 40 years.
The Gun-Death rate is growing faster than the US population rate
The U.S. population is growing, but researchers say the rate of gun deaths has been getting worse, too. America’s gun-related homicide and suicide rates both rose 8% last year, each hitting levels not seen since the early 1990s.
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.
Covid-19 had been an additional factor for the alarming increase
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. 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.
About 14% of those killed by guns were women, but the rate of increase among them is more pronounced. There were about 7 gun deaths per 100,000 women last year, up from about 4 per 100,000 in 2010 — an increase of 71%. The comparable increase for men was 45%.
For Black women, the firearm suicide rate rose from about 1.5 per 100,000 in 2015 to about 3 per 100,000 last year. Their homicide death rate last year was more than 18 per 100,000, compared with about 4 per 100,000 for Hispanic women and 2 per 100,000 for white women.
Racial and sexual differences are also one of the reasons – homicides in cities and suicides in rural areas
The latest uprising in gun violence is primarily owing to racial and sexual differences in the US with homicide deaths are concentrated in cities and suicides are more common in rural areas.
“Firearm violence is a worsening problem in the United States,” and will require a range of efforts to control.
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US Human Rights orgs are less concerned with gun-violence in US and overzealous on issues in other parts of the globe
The various ‘Human Rights Organisations’ in the US have a record of expressing wanton concern for issues in other parts of the globe, especially in the developing world but when the issue boils down to their country they have their discomfiture to bury it down. Ironically, seldom there is an outburst similar to what we see from them crying a hell in India.
Of course, the gun-violence and its alarming rise in the United States is a highly disturbing catastrophe for any civilized society, there is an urgent need for psychosomatic analyses for all such neurotic violence and long-term sustainable solutions should be sought after giving due diligence to various emotional factors.
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