GUNS, DEATH, AND NUMBERS.

PositionSMOKING GUN - Gun violence

A delegation of journalists from India who recently visited The Progressive through the U.S. State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program expressed astonishment at the lack of effort to address rising gun violence in the United States. They were right to be perplexed. Despite overwhelming public support for gun reform, only the slimmest of successes seem possible, given current political realities. While President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan gun bill into law on June 25, it is limited in scope and we continue to allow horrifying mass shootings to occur, again and again. Here are some measures of the madness:

45.222

Number of Americans killed by guns in 2020, the last year for which complete data is available, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

4,357

Number of victims who were children.

Firearms recently became the leading cause of death among children for the first time, according to researchers at the University of Michigan's Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention.

85%

Of mass shooting deaths from 1981 to 2017 were caused by assault weapons, according to a New York University School of Medicine study.

77%

Of mass shootings in the United States from 1966 to 2019 were carried out with legally purchased firearms, according to a study by the National Institute of Justice.

5,807

Minimum number of gun sales in 2020 in which...

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