Survey: US gun violence affects many

Gun violence in the United States is so rampant that about half of American families have experienced a gun-related incident, according to a new survey released Tuesday.

The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonprofit independent source of health policy research, found that about 1 in 5 adults say a family member has been killed by a gun (including death by suicide), and about 1 in 6 say they have witnessed someone in a shooting being injured.

In total, 54 percent of adult Americans overall say they or a family member have experienced a gun-related incident.

The survey's release comes a day after a 25-year-old male shooter killed five people and wounded eight others at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, before being shot and killed by police. Authorities said Connor Sturgeon used an AR-15-style rifle that was purchased locally and legally six days ago.

As of Monday, 11,523 people have died from gun violence in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There have been 146 mass shootings in 2023 so far, which is defined by the archive as an incident in which four or more victims are shot or killed. The mass shootings have led to 209 deaths and 563 injuries so far this year.

The survey polled 1,271 American adults in English and Spanish with gun-related violence and incidents across the US between March 14-23. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for the full sample.

The survey found that black adults were roughly twice as likely as white or Hispanic adults to report that they have had a family member killed by a gun, including by suicide, at 34 percent, compared with 17 and 18 percent of white and Hispanic adults — and to have personally witnessed someone being shot.

Seventeen percent of black adults in the survey said they don't feel "at all" safe in their neighborhoods, compared with 9 percent of Hispanic adults and 2 percent of white adults.

About a third of black and Hispanic adults together say they worry "daily" or "almost daily" that a family member could be a victim of gun violence, while 10 percent of white adults report the same level of worry.

Forty-one percent of adults said there are guns in their household, and of that number, 75 percent say the guns "are stored in ways that don't reflect some common ways gun-safety practices", the report notes — like keeping the weapon loaded or in an unlocked location.

The tally of gun violence deaths includes 378 people killed in officer-involved shootings. There have been 409 "unintentional" shootings, the Gun Violence Archive shows.

According to the survey, black adults are more than twice as likely as white adults to have lost a loved one to gun violence and to have personally witnessed someone being shot.

One in 6 black adults say that they don't feel safe in their neighborhoods, far higher than the share of white or Hispanic adults, according to the survey.

Most adults say they worry at least sometimes that they or someone in their family will become a victim of gun violence, according to the survey. Nearly a quarter of parents of children younger than 18 say they worry about it daily or almost daily.

Guns are now the leading cause of death among children and teens in the US, having surpassed car accidents in 2020. Of those who died from gun violence this year, 398 were teens and 71 were children.

Most of those deaths have occurred in Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana.

About half of all gun-related deaths are suicides, federal data shows. The suicide rate also has recently increased to near-record levels. Deaths by suicide made up most gun violence deaths this year — about 57 percent, the nonprofit gun-violence tracer reports. There has been an average of about 66 deaths by suicide per day in 2023.

There were nearly 49,000 gun-related deaths in 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — an unprecedented surge of about 23 percent over two years during the COVID-19 pandemic survey.

There are vast disparities in who is dying from guns. A recent study found that the homicide rate among young black men was nearly 10 times higher than the overall firearm death rate in the US in 2021.