The surge in gun violence across the United States in 2020 pushed the firearm homicide rate that year to its highest level in a quarter-century, the CDC reported Tuesday.
In its new report, the CDC examined how rates of deaths involving guns shifted in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. What emerged was alarming: The firearm homicide rate that year was higher than in any year since 1994.
About 4 in 5 homicides in 2020 involved firearms, the CDC report said, as did a little more than half of all suicides. Both figures were slightly up from the five previous years.released last month, the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions similarly documented a nationwide spike in the firearm homicide rate in 2020, calling it “the largest one-year increase in modern history.
Poverty was also a striking dividing line, the CDC said. Counties with the highest poverty level in 2020 “had firearm homicide and firearm suicide rates that were 4.5 and 1.3 times as high, respectively, as counties with the lowest poverty level,” the report found. The CDC report acknowledges various theories that have been offered to explain the recent increases in gun violence — including pandemic-induced stress, strained relationships between police and the public and a surge in firearm sales. But the report notably did not endorse any of these theories, instead saying that its findings “do not support causal inferences, and reasons for increasing rates and widening inequities are unclear and potentially complex.
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