On Monday, CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz cited the list of mass shootings over the Easter weekend in South Carolina and Pennsylvania. He noted that the one consistency is that they all contain bystanders, people simply out and about or partying or holding birthday events. Since January, there have been 143 mass shootings in 2022 alone, and it isn't even May. Over 600 people have been hurt.
A Washington Post report interviewed families of some of those victims caught in the crossfire. The only policy solutions have come from states that vote to allow more guns, less regulation and no training required. Yet as the access to weapons increases, so has the rate of mass shootings.
"Grievances or minor slights that might have once led to fistfights, they said, were instead suddenly escalating to gunfire," the report explained.
While the disputes are among just a few people or groups, but because they are armed those disconnected to the incident, simply present in the area, are being hurt or killed. The year of the pandemic saw a stabilization of shootings, but post-pandemic, mass shootings have doubled. Only four months into 2022, the US rate of mass shootings is approaching the totality of 2021.
"In 2020 and 2021, gun sales surged to unprecedented numbers," the report saic, citing a Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks. "That spike has eased so far this year, with an estimated 17,200 firearms purchased in the first three months of 2022, down from the previous two years."
The problem, however, is that it comes after historic increases in gun purchases.
Shootings with more than four people hurt has already surpassed the 2021 rate. While the numbers are still significantly less than what was seen in the 1990s.
Savannah, Georgia's mayor, Van Johnson, called the increase in shootings and violence “unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”
He thinks it's due to access to "illegal guns, a lack of maturity in settling disputes and a critical shortage of resources to address mental health and substance use disorders."
“I want to show that this is not ordinary,” he said. “There should be no such thing as a routine gun violence incident.”
Single-victim shootings and gun-related suicides are still the top gun-crime injuries and deaths. There's also a disparity in the kind of coverage that media does about mass shootings.
According to April M. Zeoli, an associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University, media tends to focus more on public spaces like movie theaters or the subway shooting in New York last week. Those are the locations that scare people more, leading to a higher viewership and clickrate of the reports. She also explained that the number of those impacted also determines the kind of coverage. A Sacramento shooting of four people would get a mention on cable news, but the shooting of 10 people in Brooklyn earned days of coverage.
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, also explained that the other factors are completely random. The political slant of a state or city doesn't matter.
Criminal justice Professor Caterina Roman, from Temple University, explained that the one thread is that the issues are hyper-local. Mass shootings are rarely to do with an attack on the federal government or anger about a large group of people.
“We can look at the national statistics and say, ‘This might be a trend,’ [but] I’m of the belief that to really understand violence and gun violence, we have to be looking deeper into individual cities,” Roman said. “It’s a neighborhood issue.”
The Post also cited Indianapolis, Police Chief Randal Taylor, who said that he saw an increase in senseless reasons for shootings and deaths. Some were shot and killed over a parking space, another in retaliation for an offensive social media post. He said it's unlike anything he's ever seen in 34 years of law enforcement.
“When you have people who don’t have a criminal history that are killing for these other reasons, that’s more concerning,” he explained. His city broke the homicide record in 2020 and did it again in 2021.
It has become clear that Washington isn't going to pass any legislation that involves the regulation of guns. Even with a Congressional majority, the U.S. Senate has a pro-gun majority.
Lee Davis, who worked in violence prevention programs in Pittsburgh, suggested greater funding in violence prevention programs as a solution.
