Black and Latino mothers are still burying their children,” said Pastor Michael McBride, the executive director of Live Free USA, a gun violence prevention non-profit, who has spent nearly a decade struggling to get more national political attention for the toll of daily gun violence. “We don’t get the reprieve that other communities get. Many of the homicides are concentrated in communities of color that have historically seen the worst burden of daily gun violence, including in Philadelphia, St Louis, Chicago and Oakland. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in real time using media reports, recorded nearly 4,000 more gun homicides in 2020 compared with 2019, according to founder Mark Bryant. Early estimates suggest the US may have seen at least 4,000 more murders last year than in 2019, and potentially as many as 5,000 more, according to projections based on FBI data, though complete official statistics will not be available until the fall. That’s the lowest annual count of high-profile mass shootings in America in nearly a quarter-century, according to Jillian Peterson, the founder of the Violence Project, which tracks these mass shootings going back to 1966.Īt the same time, the number of people murdered in everyday violence last year surged in cities large and small. There were only two public shootings in 2020 that primarily targeted strangers, were not related to other crimes and killed at least four victims – one standard definition researchers use to classify “mass shootings” – according to two databases that track this kind of gun violence. But a surge in daily gun violence contributed to an estimated 4,000 additional murders throughout 2020, in what experts warn will probably be the worst single-year increase in murders on record. For exactly a year during the pandemic, the United States did not see a single high-profile public mass shooting.

What types of guns are people killed by