Increase in deaths due to gun homicides, suicides

Several shooting rampages across the United States over the Fourth of July holiday led to the deaths of at least 15 people, with more than 60 wounded.

On Monday night in Philadelphia, the nation experienced its 29th mass killing this year, according to a database kept by USA Today, The Associated Press and Northeastern University. It is the most on record at this point in the year. A 40-year-old Philadelphia man was charged on Wednesday with killing five people in the shootings on Monday night.

Meanwhile, the most recent data showed that 2021 had the highest number of gun deaths ever recorded: 48,830. An average of 134 people died each day from gun violence, or 1 death every 11 minutes.

The record number of deaths was due to large increases in both gun homicides and gun suicides, according to a report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

"Our country is breaking records for all the wrong reasons — record gun sales combined with increasingly permissive gun laws are making gun violence a pervasive part of life in our country, leading to a sharp increase in gun deaths," Ari Davis, policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and lead author of the new report, said in a statement.

The 2021 record of gun deaths was an increase of more than 3,600 deaths from 2020 — the previous record high — as the number of deaths involving a gun soared during the first and second years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At least 55 percent of gun-related deaths in 2021 were suicides, the report found, increasing 8.3 percent, the largest one-year increase recorded in more than 40 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Rising rates

Gun homicides also rose in 2021, increasing 7.6 percent over the previous year. There were 20,958 gun homicides, the highest number recorded at the time, as well as the highest gun homicide rate since 1994.

Carl Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, told China Daily: "People outside the United States cannot understand why Americans tolerate so much gun violence. In fact, most Americans are disgusted by gun violence too, but they find themselves politically incapacitated to do anything meaningful about it."

In the past 40 years, nearly 1.4 million people have died from gun violence, which is more than the total number of people who have died in wars fought throughout US history.