It is impossible to draw general conclusions, to find a "common denominator" for any modification of gun ownership in the United States.
According to data from Axios.com, between the beginning of 2019 and the end of 2020, the increase in homicides involving firearms among children and adolescents was 29.5%, which is more than twice the relative increase in the overall population.
Today, more young Americans are killed by guns than by motorcycle accidents.
This was not always the case. According to the following graph on the , in the age group 0-19, from 2000 to approximately 2014, many more young people died in motorcycle accidents. The tragic turn has really been going on since 2019. Since then, more people have died by bullets. In 2020, nearly two-thirds of the 4,368 American children under the age of 19 killed by guns were homicides. (The rest are suicides or unintentional cases.)
Digging a little deeper, there are many more boys than girls among the victims, and we can also discover sharp racial differences. Four times as many black children die by gunfire as white children. The difference between individual states is also quite large. According to the statistics for 100,000 children and young people under the age of 19, the worst situation is in the state of Louisiana (12.9 percent), followed by – interestingly – in Alaska (12 percent). It is followed by Mississippi (10.9) and South Carolina (9.9).
the official 2021 census data, in the "death list" state of Louisiana, almost 33 percent of the population is black and African-American. This could somewhat explain the high number of black victims, but only 3.7 percent of Alaska's population is black, so gun deaths there must have other causes.
We found a website that summarizes the gun permits issued in 2021. According to E, 65.4 percent of residents in Alaska owned at least one gun. From the point of view of protection against dangerous wildlife in Alaska, this is not surprising, because in Florida, for example, this ratio is only 35.5 percent. And in California it is even less, only 28.8 percent of the population keeps a gun at home, and even less in the state of New Jersey, 14.7 percent.
Death by gun can have another dramatic cause. It is about the fact that from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2020, the rate of drug overdose and drug poisoning among children and adolescents increased by 83.6 percent.
It can be seen from all this that it is almost impossible to draw general conclusions, to find a "common denominator" for any modification of the carrying of weapons in the United States. In any case, less than a month ago, after an 18-year-old man shot and killed ten black customers in a Buffalo supermarket, and then another teenage perpetrator massacred 19 elementary school students and two teachers in a Texas elementary school, the law on the carrying of weapons guaranteed in the Constitution was modified somewhat yesterday.
This was already supported in the first step, by a ratio of 65-33, in the US Senate. 15 Republicans joined the Democratic members, thus forming the majority. The House of Representatives also voted and President Biden signed it. As of yesterday, buyers under the age of 21 would be subject to stricter checks and those previously convicted of domestic violence would not be able to buy guns, and states could regulate so that people considered dangerous could not get guns.
Viewed from Europe, this seems too little and it is primarily about reassuring the population that politicians (now including the Republicans) do not only regret publicly on television after each tragedy, but also try to do something.
Moreover, American society itself is trapped. Many articles have already mentioned that after each murder committed with a gun, people who did not have a gun before that rush to the stores that sell guns. So every new murder, whether the perpetrator is young or not, only strengthens the gun lobby in each case.
Image: Pixabay
