Gun violence is – again – a hotly debated topic in the US after the recent school shooting. Current data shows that entire groups of people are shot almost every day across the country.
When weapons and lethal force are currently being discussed in the USA, the term “mass shooting crisis” is also mentioned, i.e. a “mass shooting crisis”. In the public debate, deadly gun violence is perceived as an ongoing, threatening phenomenon – less than a collection of isolated cases that have randomly accumulated over the past few weeks.
Entire groups of people are currently being shot dead in the United States almost every day. The school massacre in the Texas city of Uvalde at the end of May may have caused consternation worldwide, but to put it cynically it fits into a twisted kind of normality of violence. In the USA people are shot and die every day. Whether it’s at a graduation party or at a nightclub. Disputes that can be settled with words or, in the worst case, with fists, leave dead people behind.
The television channel CNN this week listed cases in which people have recently fallen victim to mass murders with weapons and asked concerned how violent the coming weekend would be. A total of 13 fatal shootings in just two days alone, the broadcaster subtitled a news report. And the only cases that qualify as “mass shooting” are cases in which four or more people are shot at once.
Horrifying figures on gun violence
Uvalde highlighted the rampant gun violence in the States: Two weeks ago, an 18-year-old shot a total of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school before he was killed himself by emergency services.
In Washington, the House of Representatives has now set up a commission of inquiry into deadly gun violence – and it has come to a shocking conclusion, as “Sky News” reports: within the 14 days since the mass murder in Uvalde there have been fatal shootings in 43 of 50 US states, it says in an article of the news portal. The authors refer to data from the “Gun Violence Archive”, a non-profit organization that collects data on gun violence in the USA and processes it into statistics. A total of 730 people have been killed in more than 640 shootings since May 24, it said. Of these, 23 were children and 66 were teenagers.
The mass murder of Uvalde was also not a special exception by US standards, it is said. In the period since May 24, there have been fewer gun deaths than the Texas elementary school massacre on just five days. However, the data adds up deaths from different shootings. The school massacre at Robb Elementary School stands out in its horror and number of dead in a single location. It is the worst school shooting in Texas history and the third worst in the United States.
Nevertheless – the “mass shooting crisis” continues and the question of how deadly the next weekend or the next celebration will be is apparently currently being asked by many people in the USA.
Quellen: CNN, Sky News, Gun Violence Archive
