A new report from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions found that gun violence in 2021 was the worst it has ever been, with gun-related homicides and suicides reaching record levels.
In 2021, the report found that 48,830 people lost their lives in firearm-related deaths, an 8% jump from 2020’s total, or an additional 3,600 more deaths.
In a shocking statistic, this means that every 11 minutes in 2021, someone lost their life as a result of gun violence.
The report noted that the increase from 2020 to 2021 was the largest single-year increase in the last 40 years, and Ari Davis, policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and lead author of the new report, shared in a statement that these are records we don’t want to be breaking.
“Our country is breaking records for all the wrong reasons – record gun sales combined with increasingly permissive gun laws are making gun violence a pervasive part of life in our country, leading to a sharp increase in gun deaths,” Davis said in a statement.
When it comes to who has been buying guns, the report highlights that it was everyone.
“Millions of first-time purchasers, including Black and Hispanic/Latino people, and women of all races and ethnicities, bought guns during the pandemic at unprecedented levels,” it said, noting that this directly coincided with rising gun deaths.
Davis noted this, saying that “Guns are driving” the increase in deaths in this country.
“I think in some ways that’s not surprising, because we’ve seen large increases in gun purchasing,” Davis continued. “We’ve seen a large number of states make it much easier to carry a gun in public, concealed carry, and to purchase a gun without having to go through some of the vetting process that other states have.”
The report found that more than half of the firearm deaths in 2021 were suicides, meaning 26,328 people took their lives, an 8.3% increase from 2020. The homicide rate was up 7.6%.
Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions and co-author of the report, shared that “Each life lost to gun violence represents a family torn apart, a community suffering.”
As for the victims of gun-related suicide, the report found that White men and those 75 and older were the most at risk of such deaths, while younger Black men faced significantly higher chances of being killed in a firearm homicide.
The report noted that, as a whole, Black people were 14 times more likely to die by gun homicide than White people, with more than a third of all gun homicides in 2021 involving Black men ages 15 to 34.
When it comes to solutions, Crifasi shared that data clearly showed states with stronger gun violence prevention laws had lower rates of gun violence.
“Passage of evidence-based solutions would help end the needless suffering happening in all corners of our country,” Crifasi said.
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