In a country with more guns than people, schoolchildren learn to crouch to dodge bullets, heroes pounce on attackers, and elected officials voice their “thoughts and prayers.” The numbers are relentless: In the United States, mass shootings have been steadily increasing for more than 20 years, in a more recent context with an overall increase in homicides. The murders happen in schools, churches, supermarkets or at work. And nothing seems to be able to stop her.
The murders in numbers: almost two mass shootings a day
Three shootings and 21 dead in four days. The attacks on a Lunar New Year dance hall in Los Angeles, on a farm south of San Francisco and on a gas station in Washington state made headlines. But their frequency isn’t exceptional: For three consecutive years, since 2020, the United States has surpassed 600 mass shootings per year, according to statistics from the website Gun Violence Archive, which defines them as firearm attacks with at least 4 dead or wounded, not including the shooter.
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The FBI, on the other hand, counts rarer events that rule out the bulk of gang violence and drug trafficking: incidents involving an “active” shooter that require a real-time law enforcement response to stop the threats. An American evil that has been evolving and accelerating since the 1980s. The number of incidents has increased fivefold since the early 2000s: from an average of a dozen per year (2000-2008) to 60 in 2021. These shooters are almost exclusively male, mostly young (33 years on average). And when almost seven out of ten are white, that reflects the overall demographics of the US population.
This wave of mass shooting fever has long been a paradox: the homicide rate has been falling steadily for 25 years from the highs of the 1990s. But it’s up more than 50% since 2014, with a jump in 2020. At 6.9 homicides per 100,000 people, the United States has returned to 1997 levels, at a rate five times higher than France. Overall, there were nearly 23,000 homicides in the United States in 2021, 80% of them involving firearms.
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The Roots of Evil: “Death to Despair”
Gun prevalence, poorly supported mental health, rising economic inequalities, Covid-19 pandemic… Many factors are listed by experts to explain an increase in shootings that are still poorly understood. But for Jillian Peterson and James Densley, researchers and co-founders of the Violence Project, “these killings are not random acts of violence but rather symptoms of a deeper societal problem: the continuing rise in ‘deaths of desperation.'” A term that specifically encompasses the suicides and overdoses of the opiate crisis, which is particularly affecting white men. And, with the death of Covid-19, helped reduce the life expectancy of Americans by 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021.
Jillian Peterson, a psychologist and professor of criminology, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice, examined 50 years of data on shootings and report their findings in the New York Times:
Almost all killers are men, often socially isolated from their families or communities who feel excluded. Mass shooting is a way of forcing others to witness their pain by attempting to end their lives in ways they control.”
Whether the attackers are shot dead by police, turn their guns on themselves, or spend the end of their days in prison, she says it’s “a form of suicide.”
As they campaign for sweeping firearms reform, these experts say elected officials “need to find ways to reduce social isolation and improve mental health care.” And finally: “Instead, we let mass shootings become normal in American culture. »