The racist mass shooting at a supermarket in upstate New York dominated a bloody weekend of gun violence across the United States, a scourge that has increased since the pandemic began.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .While the murder of ten Black people by a white supremacist teenager in Buffalo captured news headlines, smaller incidents elsewhere embodied how common public shootings have become in America.
One person was killed and four others wounded after a shooting at a church near Los Angeles on Sunday while the Milwaukee Bucks canceled a party after 20 people were wounded in shootings outside their arena Friday.
More than 45,000 Americans died from guns — slightly over half by suicide — in 2021, up from just over 39,000 in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.
As of May 16, some 7,000 people have already died from homicide shootings or unintentional gunshots in the United States this year, with shootings in public places an almost daily occurrence.
There have been 202 mass shootings, defined as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed, already in 2022, according to the archive.
Experts say the rise in gun crime is being fueled by social dislocation caused by the pandemic and the proliferation of so-called “ghost guns” which can be assembled at home and are virtually impossible to trace.
“Unless the United States really works on getting a consistent process in place to regulate, license and monitor gun ownership, you’re going to continue to have these types of incidents and they will increase,” Keith Taylor, a gun violence expert at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told AFP.
Also this past weekend, two people were killed and three injured when a gunfight broke out at a flea market in Houston, Texas, on Sunday.
“One weekend in America,” tweeted New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, before listing the weekend’s spate of shootings.
“It is well past time for outrage and action. It is well past time for Congress to step up and pass real nationwide gun safety legislation,” he wrote.
