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US court decision will ensure gun deaths soar. But it doesn’t have to be this way. [1]
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Date: 2022-07-05
Number of US mass shooting incidents from 2014 to 2021. Source: www.gunviolencearchive.org
Mid-way through 2022, the USA is on track to record the highest-ever annual tally of children aged 0 to 11 killed and injured by firearms. The toll to the end of June was 546. The highest total on record was 1,063 last year.
The USA will almost certainly reach the highest-ever annual total of teenagers 12 to 17 killed and injured by guns. The June 30 tally was 2,401. Highest ever was 4,632, also last year.
Deaths and injuries in school shootings so far this year total 78. That compares with 78 for all of last year, and just 12 the year before. The highest was 124 in 2018.
Other categories tracking towards fresh records are schoolteachers shot, police officers shot, victims shot by police and suicides by gun. Numbers that are high, but below the records – so far – include homicide, at 9,939 to the end of June, and mass shooting incidents, at 297.
All these categories of gun deaths are zero or close to zero in Australia this year, as in other developed countries with effective gun laws.
Australia’s experience
Australia remains the classic case study of the effectiveness of reducing gun ownership. It is the best model for the USA given the multiple historical, cultural, social and economic similarities.
In the 26 years since the 1996 gun restrictions, there has been only one targeted mass shooting, two family mass shootings and three random public mass shootings. Victims of all mass shootings in the 26 years since 1996 number 28 killed and 18 injured, a total of 46. That compares with 128 killed and 98 injured in mass shootings in the 26 years before 1996, a total of 226. The difference is even more pronounced when measured by population, which has now increased by 42 per cent since 1996. Mass shooting victims relative to population since 1996 are 86 per cent lower than before.
There have been no shootings with more than seven victims since 1996; there were eight in the 26 years before. Nineteen of the last 26 years have had no mass shootings of any kind. The last was in 2019.
The USA, in contrast, recorded an average of 371 mass shootings over the four years 2016 to 2019, and more than six hundred in each of the last two years. See blue chart, above. With 297 to 30 June, the USA is on track for a similar toll this year.
Latest developments
On Thursday June 23, the US Supreme Court overturned a New York law which restricted firearms outside the home. This allows virtually all Americans to carry concealed and loaded handguns in public henceforward.
US gun deaths will almost certainly go much higher before there’s any hope of them being lowered.
*
This is an abbreviated version of an article published yesterday in Independent Australia. The original article is available here in full for free:
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/us-court-decision-will-ensure-gun-deaths-soar,16525
*
“Alan Austin is a great Australian journalist and,
I think, a pirate. I steal Alan Austin’s findings all the time.”
~ Jordan Shanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtV-2X4BjQI
*
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