Artist’s statement:
An ode to the performative sentiment of “Thoughts and Prayers to the families of those affected by [*fill in gun related incident here*]”. The question being, how many people in the United States have to die at the hands of gun related violence and mass shootings before lawmakers on both sides can come together and take steps to stop this? How long will the right to bear arms outweigh the right for someone to live without constant fear of a gun related death?
The list below is by no means exhaustive of gun violence and mass shooting statistics in 2023 and beyond. This is an artistic record of the more sensational news stories where the gunperson is identified.
Check out the Gun Violence Archive or Mass Shooting Tracker (MST) for more dedicated information collection.
Quick Facts:
According to the Small Arms Survey, “there are about 120 guns for every 100 Americans”. To date, there is no other nation that that has more civilian guns available than there are people. (Source: CNN.)
According to a Pew survey done in April 2021, almost a third of adults polled in the U.S. (31%) believe that there would be less crime if more people owned guns; 34% believed that there would be no difference in the amount of gun related violence, and 34% thought that if more people owned guns there would be more crimes. (Source: Pew Research Center.)
This belief is in sharp contrast to many studies that show that the more easily accessible firearms are, the more frequent gun-related deaths (including homicide, suicide, and unintended injuries) tend to be. (Source: CNN.)
Firearms are connected to more than 50% of all suicides and they “are used in more than 50% of female homicides.” In the United States, firearms are 90% of the cause of death to children in developed, high-income nations, and overall they are the third-leading cause of death in children in the U.S. (Source: AAFP.)
The Dicky Amendment, a provision in a 1996 spending bill, put strict provisions on the government’s ability to use federal funds to advocate for or promote gun control. (Source: National Library of Medicine.)
A spending bill passed in 2018 attempted to pull back some of the restrictions. Page 23 of the spending bill stats that while the CDC and other agencies have limitations on using federal funding to advocate for or promote gun control, the CDC has the authority to research the causes of gun violence. (Source: DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2018.) However, there is gap around whether the research the CDC conducts could be used to advocate or promote gun control.
Caia Rose 