Startling uptrends: So many people are dying from guns in the US

With sad regularity, rampages with many dead and injured shake the USA. More than a dozen have died in two mass shootings in California recently. An end to the firearms epidemic is not in sight – on the contrary.

The USA was already shaken by several mass shootings with many deaths in January of the new year 2023. A gunman opened fire at a dance hall on the fringes of a Chinese New Year celebration in Southern California. Ten people died at the Monterey Park crime scene, and another victim later succumbed to his injuries in hospital. Just two days after the Monterey Park bloody crime, a farm worker in California apparently shot dead seven of his colleagues.

Gun violence and deadly attacks of this magnitude are sadly normal in the United States. More than 20,000 people, not counting suicides, have been killed by firearms in accidents, murders and rampages in the United States in the past two years. The most recent peak was in 2021 with around 21,000 deaths. The trend has been rising again for several years, in 2014 the number was significantly lower at around 12,400 gun victims. The number of firearm-related suicides increased to almost 24,000 from 2014 to 2019 – accounting for more than half of the total number of all firearm-related deaths.

The number of gun deaths in the United States has long been unusually high for a country with a high level of development: As a study from 2018 determined, there were more than 10 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the United States in 2016 in connection with guns, suicides locked in. That was more than ten times as many as in Germany (0.9) in the same year. The score was even lower in the UK (0.3) and Japan (0.2), and slightly higher in Austria (2.1) and Switzerland (2.8).

However, there are also regional differences in the number of gun deaths within the USA: As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has determined, the conservative southern states and other rural states in the Midwest are particularly affected. In the southern US state of Mississippi, for example, more than 28 people per 100,000 inhabitants died from firearms in 2020 – in the state of Massachusetts in the north-eastern US, however, it was only 3.7.

There has also been a worrying trend towards rampages in the USA recently: In the statistics, these appear under “mass shootings” and describe incidents with firearms in which more than four people are injured or killed. According to the non-governmental organization The Gun Violence Archive, the number of mass shootings in the United States has more than doubled since 2014. In 2021, it reached its peak at 690 – on average, that was almost two serious shootings per day. In the following year, there were only slightly fewer, with 647 attacks.

Some of the deadliest killing sprees in US history have also occurred in the past decade. The most serious was the Las Vegas attack in 2017, which killed more than 50 people and injured around 500. There was also a particularly bloody attack in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, where a gunman killed 49 people and injured 53. Last year, the killing spree at an elementary school in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, caused horror: 19 school children and two teachers were shot dead.

The causes of the many fatal firearms incidents in the United States are disputed. The widespread use and easy access to pistols and rifles are often given as the reason. According to the Swiss research project Small Arms Survey, more than 390 million firearms were in circulation in the United States in 2018, an average of 120 per 100 people. For comparison: In Germany there were almost 16 million firearms, about 20 per 100 inhabitants. In Austria there are around 30 firearms per 100 inhabitants, in Switzerland around 28.

In addition, the number of gun owners in the United States has recently increased significantly. According to another study, between January 2019 and April 2021, around 7.5 million US adults became first-time gun owners. This in turn brought 11 million people into contact with guns in their homes, including 5 million children. About half of all new gun owners were women. In violent armed crime, however, the perpetrators are predominantly male.