Two recent shootings have brought gun violence back to the fore in the United States, a phenomenon that did not go away during the coronavirus pandemic, fueled by a sharp rise in gun sales in 2020 .
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Wearing a mask, closing restaurants, schools and universities, exit restrictions … COVID-19 has turned the lives of Americans upside down without, however, stemming acts of violence. Several large cities, including the federal capital Washington, recorded an increase in homicides last year.
According to figures compiled by the organization Gun Violence Archive, firearms killed 43,536 people in 2020, including 19,380 by homicide, a record for this category since 2014. There have been 611 “mass shootings”, which count at least four victims, in 2020, against 417 the previous year.
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And since January 1, more than 4,000 people have already been killed by a gun.
“For a year now, communities have not only suffered from the pandemic and its financial consequences, but also from gun violence, a public health crisis that has exploded in all its forms,” said Tuesday the Executive Director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Robyn Thomas, during her Senate hearing, citing in particular suicides and acts of domestic violence.
The year 2020 was also marked by a historic movement of anger against racism after the death of George Floyd, an African-American suffocated by a white police officer during his arrest in late May in Minneapolis.
Protests have escalated in the United States and around the world, also fueling tensions between communities and personal arms sales, which soared in the spring. According to a study by Washington post, 23 million weapons were purchased in 2020, including 2.5 million in June.
“When Americans are worried about their personal safety, they buy firearms,” the Brookings Institute summed up in a study published last July. “These concerns have been generalized since March, first because of the COVID-19 pandemic and then because of the social unrest that followed the death of George Floyd”, explained the study.
Legislating promises to be difficult
In 2017, a poll by the independent Pew Research Center found that 42% of American adults had at least one gun in their home.
The two recent killings in Georgia and Colorado have reignited calls for tougher gun sales legislation, including checks on buyers’ criminal records and the pre-transaction waiting period, which already exists. in several states.
The Atlanta killer bought his gun just hours before killing eight people on March 16. On the same day, the perpetrator of the Boulder shooting bought the semi-automatic rifle with which he is suspected of having killed ten people on Monday, including a police officer in a supermarket.
“It is worth asking if the waiting times could have avoided this tragedy in Georgia,” said on Twitter Igor Volsky, general manager of the anti-gun association Guns Down America, in the aftermath of the Atlanta tragedy.
These delays “prevent purchases and impulsive acts of violence,” he argued.
Democrats, in power in Congress and the White House, have offered to toughen the legislation, a topic nearly two-thirds of Americans said they were in favor of in 2019, according to the Pew Institute.
But this hypothesis remains improbable given the strong opposition from defenders of the right to own a weapon, guaranteed by the second amendment to the Constitution, and the thin Democratic majority in the Senate, which makes it difficult to pass any legislation without convincing the government. minus 10 elected Republicans.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz announced the color Tuesday by lambasting “the political objective” of the majority, which according to him wants “to take up the arms of citizens who respect the law”.
Another Republican Senator, John Kennedy, drew a daring comparison to motorists responsible for fatal drunken accidents. “The answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers,” he said.