Pandemic widening the US divide

Students slain

On Nov 30, a 15-year-old boy armed with a semiautomatic handgun opened fire at Oxford High School in Michigan, killing four students, injuring six others and a teacher. The incident renewed national debate on school shootings and gun violence against the backdrop of the pandemic.

Also last month, a school in Arizona banned backpacks and food deliveries after a student was shot in a bathroom. A district in New York state offered remote learning following two separate shootings near its schools. Nationwide, schools are increasing safety measures, canceling classes and even using police escorts for students arriving on campus.

There have been 240 school shooting incidents in the US this year, an all-time high, according to the Center for Homeland Defense and Security's K-12 School Shooting Database. This total is over 100 more than those in 2019 or 2018, respectively the second- and third-worst years on record.

Such trends are part of an overall rise in what has been called a gun violence "epidemic" across the US, tied in part to record sales of such weapons.

Gun violence rose by 30 percent nationwide year-on-year in the 12 months from March last year, according to a new study published by the international journal Nature in October.

There was a significant rise in gun violence in 28 of the 50 US states. In Minnesota, Michigan and New York, the rate shot up by 100 percent, the study found.

Study leader Paddy Ssentongo, an assistant professor at the Center for Neural Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, said, "We are not surprised that the gun violence rates have been higher during the pandemic, but we are surprised by the magnitude of the increase."

Ssentongo said the pandemic has been associated with psychological distress caused by shelter-in-place orders, increased rates of domestic violence, disruption of social networks, unemployment and record increases in gun sales and access to guns. He added that all these factors are plausible explanations for the surge in such violence.