Gun Violence Victimization Increased Again this Memorial Day
Gun Violence Victimization Increased Again this Memorial Day
800 victims include over a hundred teenagers and a dozen children under 12.
Memorial day weekend provides a snapshot of what cities may expect this summer despite the proliferation of splashy, multi-million dollar initiatives that hire former gang members to “try” to prevent violence.
This map is interactive, so open the link to see the annual breakdown of firearm fatalities and injuries nationally surrounding Memorial Day since 2014. Apparently, 800 Americans getting shot during a holiday weekend isn’t as newsworthy as the season finale of Succession. Nor is the fact that firearm violence is still elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels in dozens of major cities.
The interactive chart below, 2023 Memorial Day Gun Violence vs. Pre-Pandemic, shows the number of fatal and non-fatal firearm injuries people incurred in major cities in 2019 and 2023.
Forbes is the only national media outlet I’ve noticed covering this, although local outlets in major cities like Chicago and Philadelphia that experience the lion’s share of Memorial Day firearm violence are all over it. It’s sickening that the bulk of firearm violence gets zero national news coverage. We shouldn’t acquiesce to this level of gun violence in our communities.
There's a rigid divide on how to solve this topic that seems to stem from a complete lack of ability to address the US relationship with guns from first principles, thanks to the second amendment.
I don't read about people laying out a series of goals, and then scoring them. Perhaps freedom from action movie amounts of gun violence, protection from government tyranny, guns are cool get your hands off you wouldn't be okay with the gov taking your beautiful guitars away.
Guns vs other weapons... I suspect that having lots of guns available increases homicide rates. Chicago had 695 homicides in 2022 city-wide according to the chicago police (https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/CompStat-Public-2022-Year-End-1.pdf), and Toronto had something around 90. These are all homicides. But anecdotally, Toronto is seeing an increase in homicides as we hear more and more about gun violence becoming more common. I feel pretty comfortable saying that guns increase homicides, but I don't have all the smoking guns (ha) to show it perfectly.
The gun-apologetics I find in some people like Handwaving Freakoutery (recent article about concealed carry https://hwfo.substack.com/p/debunking-the-cap-fact-sheet?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=257285&post_id=125062550&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email). I'm using GPT to summarize this because it's quite lengthy, but I've skimmed, and the general vibe is similar to other interactions I've had with HWFO folks on guns.
It's weird to see people arguing that a 10x higher per-capita homicide rate (Chicago and Toronto are very similar, chicago is more densely populated) can't have anything to do with guns. Or at least debunking any attempts at saying maybe the way the US does guns has something to do with it. But also, I haven't seen HWFO lying about statistics when they take apart aspects of the gun violence debate. It feels like they're doing easy takedowns of bad anti-gun activism, but again, hard to show.
Poverty, a really mean culture and lots of guns are probably the cause of these things. Fix medical bankruptcies and predatory anti-poor practices and maybe it will improve, until the flogging continues.