{"id":69641,"date":"2021-07-10T19:34:46","date_gmt":"2021-07-11T00:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69641"},"modified":"2021-07-10T19:34:46","modified_gmt":"2021-07-11T00:34:46","slug":"69641","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69641","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Pandemic gun violence surge was not linked to rise in gun sales, study finds<\/a>
\nResearch suggests looking at role of job loss, economic change, closure of schools and community organizations and civil unrest<\/em><\/p>\n

Gun homicides surged across the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, in the same year that Americans bought a\u00a0record-breaking number of guns<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But some of America\u2019s leading gun violence researchers have concluded that what might seem like an obvious cause-and-effect \u2013 a surge in gun buying leads to a surge in gun violence \u2013 is not supported by the data.<\/p>\n

Through July of last year, there was no clear association between the increase in firearm purchases and the increase in most interpersonal gun violence at the state level, according to a\u00a0new study<\/a>\u00a0published in Injury Epidemiology,\u00a0<\/em>a peer-reviewed scientific journal.<\/p>\n

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The findings suggest that \u201cwe need to be looking at other factors, like job loss, economic change, the closure of schools and community organizations and nonprofits, and civil unrest,\u201d in order to understand last year\u2019s increase in gun violence, Julia Schleimer, the lead author of the new study, said.<\/p>\n

There did appear to be some association between the increase in gun purchasing and an increase in domestic violence gun injuries in April and May, but that correlation might also be explained by other factors, including increased substance abuse or the decreased access to domestic violence support services during the early months of lockdown, Schleimer said.<\/p>\n

The results of the new study are an unexpected addition to the fierce political battle over how to explain last year\u2019s\u00a0estimated 25% increase in homicides<\/a>, which experts say they expect will be the worst single-year increase in killings since the 1960s. While official government data is not yet available, experts are projecting that the US saw an additional\u00a04,000 to 5,000 homicides<\/a>\u00a0nationwide in 2020, and the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive recorded nearly\u00a04,000 additional gun homicides last year<\/a>\u00a0compared with 2019.<\/p>\n

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People wait in line outside a gun store in Burbank, California.<\/span>\u00a0Photograph: Mark J Terrill\/AP<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even though the homicide rate across big cities remains close to half of what it was in the 1990s, some politicians have used the single-year jump in killings to paint Democrats and the Biden administration as\u00a0soft on crime<\/a>, using an old political playbook of stoking anxiety over crime and violence in order to win elections.<\/p>\n

Joe Biden has responded by focusing on firearms access and calling for new gun control laws, as well as supporting increased funding for police and community violence intervention programs.<\/p>\n

The findings of the new study from the state-funded\u00a0Violence Prevention Research Program<\/a>\u00a0at the University of California, Davis, do not fit tidily into either of these partisan political narratives. While the new study raises doubts about a correlation between last year\u2019s spike in gun purchases and the increases in shootings, it doesn\u2019t address the underlying risk of easy access to guns in the US, Schleimer said.<\/p>\n

While official government crime data is not yet available for 2020, roughly three-quarters of US homicides annually are committed with guns, and experts estimate nonfatal shootings injure 100,000 people a year, often\u00a0leaving survivors with serious, life-altering injuries<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is a large body of research demonstrating the correlation between gun access and increased risk of gun injury, Schleimer said, an association that is particularly clear when it comes to the risk of gun suicide. The increase in shootings during 2020 may have been driven by Americans who already owned guns before the pandemic, not by the people who bought guns for the first time last year \u2013 but that does not mean that gun access is irrelevant, she said.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the lack of any clear correlation between what the researchers estimated as\u00a04.3m additional firearm purchases<\/a>\u00a0nationally from March through July 2020, and a 27% increase in firearm injuries over that time, suggests that other factors besides gun access and gun control laws deserve more attention, and more research, Schleimer said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of strategies that can address some of the more social determinants of violence,\u201d Schleimer said, including supporting violence interrupters and other community-based violence intervention programs, and focusing on economic policies that might help reduce gun violence, which is deeply correlated with poverty and concentrated disadvantage. \u201cThere\u2019s some good evidence on youth summer job programs and young people\u2019s risk for violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

It made sense that politicians and other public figures would point to the increase in gun buying in 2020 as a potential reason shootings had increased last year, Schleimer said.<\/p>\n

But, she said, \u201cOur findings, from this current study, in this particular context, are not supporting that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new study has several limitations, including the complexity of factors that might have influenced gun violence during 2020, and the lack of official data on both gun sales and gun injuries. The researchers estimated gun sales using federal background check data, and relied on shooting incident data collected from media reports by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.<\/p>\n

Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, said the study followed \u201crigorous statistical methods,\u201d and that it raised interesting questions about whether the increase in gun violence might be more closely connected to some Americans\u2019 willingness to carry their previously purchased guns during the pandemic, rather than a spike in first-time gun purchases.<\/p>\n

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A customer hands over his ID for a background check to a manager before making a purchase at Firearms Unknown in Oceanside, California.<\/span>\u00a0Photograph: Bing Guan\/Reuters<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was possible that in some states, many of the additional gun sales in 2020 went to people who had already owned multiple firearms \u2013 meaning that the surge in sales did not necessarily contribute to an increase in the overall prevalence of gun ownership, Webster said in an email.<\/p>\n

\u201cData from Chicago and some other cities suggest that we have seen\u00a0a sharp increase in illegal gun carrying<\/a>,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe role that guns are playing in the increased levels of homicides may have more to do with increases in illegal gun carrying than with the number of incidents in which people buy guns legally, especially in the short-term.\u201d<\/p>\n

In general, Webster wrote, the relationship between gun ownership and the increased likelihood of a shooting depended a lot on who was acquiring the gun. \u201cIn places and among individuals who are particularly low risk, more guns may have little impact on rates of lethal violence, but in places and among individuals of high risk, gun ownership can greatly increase risks of lethal violence,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Schleimer also cautioned that it\u2019s possible that there might be some connection between gun purchasing and gun violence in 2020 that was masked by other factors the researchers were not able to measure or control for.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast year was such a unique year in many ways, and the context was continually evolving, and there were a lot of factors changing all at once, both locally and at the state level and nationally in the context of the pandemic and social and civil unrest,\u201d Schleimer said. \u201cThat really complicated what we were able to do analytically.\u201d<\/p>\n

To examine the possible link between gun sales and shootings, the UC Davis researchers looked at trends in gun purchasing, and gun injuries, across 48 states, and then examined whether there was a correlation between the number of additional guns purchased and the number of additional gun injuries during the spring and summer. They controlled for a range of state-level factors that might influence the number of gun injuries, including stay-at-home orders, coronavirus cases and deaths, unemployment, measures of racial tension and civil unrest and seasonal variations in rates of gun injury.<\/p>\n

While an\u00a0early analysis<\/a>\u00a0from the same researchers, looking only at March through May, had found a correlation between increased gun purchases and gun injuries, their final analysis did not find any clear pattern between how many additional guns were purchased in a state through July 2020 and how much of an increase the state saw in non-domestic violence firearms injuries. The study did not analyze gun suicides or suicide attempts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pandemic gun violence surge was not linked to rise in gun sales, study finds Research suggests looking at role of job loss, economic change, closure of schools and community organizations and civil unrest Gun homicides surged across the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, in the same year that Americans bought a\u00a0record-breaking number of guns. … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rkba","category-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69642,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69641\/revisions\/69642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}