A baby in the car seat, a man in his bed, a girl walking beside her mother: each of them died from stray bullets within days of each other and at times when the gun violence rages on U.S.
(Read here: Crime in the United States skyrockets with historical figures of violence)
In addition to record numbers of suicides and homicides in various cities across the country, an unknown number of people are dying from bullets that were not intended for them.
(Also: Gun owners would have to pay for an insurance policy in California)
Those deaths briefly spark media and police attention, as do mass shootings, but then attention dwindles until the next tragedy.
“It happens very often,” said Chris Herrmann, a gun violence expert at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If that happened in another country, it would be front page news,” he added.
On January 16, Matthew Willson, a 31-year-old British astrophysicist, was sleeping at his girlfriend’s house in Atlanta when he was woken up by the sound of gunfire and was fatally wounded shortly thereafter.
“It’s impossible to understand how this can be true,” his sister Kate told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Almost a week later Kerri Gray was driving with her 6-month-old son when she heard a noise and two cars speed by. “There was no broken glass. There was no screaming. It was an instant,” she told reporters after her little girl’s death.
(In other news: Two dead in upstate New York shooting)
Melissa Ortega, 8, was walking down a Chicago street on January 22 when a man shot at another but killed her. “He took away my purpose for existing. The reason why he got me up every day. He stripped me of a life full of dreams,” lamented Araceli Leanos, mother of the minor, on the Univisión TV channel.
The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said they do not track deaths from stray bullets in the United States, where some 40,000 people are killed by firearms annually, most of them suicides.
Armed violence has increased since the start of the pandemic
Official statistics differentiate between accidental and intentional deaths, but not regarding the exact circumstances of the events.
Herrmann estimates that stray bullet deaths are between 1 percent and 2 percent of all firearm deaths, and the number rises or falls based on the number of mass shootings.
“When shootings went up 10 percent, you saw a 10 percent increase in unwanted targets,” he said, explaining that he lamented the official term “targets” as dehumanizing.
But the bullets fall and hit people often a mile away from where the gun was fired.
The problem of gun violence in the United States has increased since the start of the pandemic and the protests for racial justice in 2020 and at the end of 2021, record numbers of homicides were reported in large cities such as Philadelphia, Austin, Columbus and Indianapolis.
(You may be interested in: The criminal gangs of Colombians that plague several US cities.)
Despite the fact that the national homicide rate remains below the peaks of the 1980s and 1990s, it increased in 2020 at a rate not seen since national records were kept, in 1960.
At the same time, firearms sales set a record in 2020 with nearly 23 million guns sold, followed by nearly 20 million in 2021, according to consultancy Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting.
Millions of these guns ended up in the hands of novice owners who lack safety training, experts say “Too many inexperienced people handling guns is always a recipe for disaster,” said Peter Squires, a professor of criminology at the University of Brighton in the UK.
This avalanche of weapons can also unleash a hail of shots into the air at parties or special dates. “But the bullets fall and hit people often a mile away from where the gun was fired,” the expert explained. However, it is the bullets intended for other people that cause a large number of victims.
Tiffani Evans, 34, was outside a relative’s home in Maryland, not far from Washington DC, enjoying dinner on a warm August night when her son Peyton was killed by a stray bullet.
The 8-year-old boy was inside the house eating and playing video games when the shooting began as part of a violent dispute in which the boy had nothing to do. He was “sitting at the table with his head down, with a bullet in his head,” his mother recalls.
Evans believes that this type of violence has its origin in a series of problems such as the lack of government resources to keep young people on the right path, as well as the failure of parents to teach them about the value of human life, added illegal possession of firearms in the country.
“There is too much access to illegal weapons,” he added. “We have to put a stop to it. The government has to control this”
AFP
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