As pandemic ebbs, an old fear is new again: mass shootings
After a year of pandemic lockdowns, mass shootings are back — but the guns never went away
May 4, 2021, 10:48 PM
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Overnight, three people were killed and two were injured in a shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The Associated PressPORTLAND, Ore. -- Brianne Smith was overjoyed to get an e-mail telling her to schedule a second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Hours later, her relief was replaced by dread: a phone alert — another mass public shooting.
Before the pandemic, she would scan for the nearest exit in public places and routinely practiced active shooter drills at the company where she works. But after a year at home in the pandemic, those anxieties had faded. Until now.
“I haven't been living in fear with COVID because I'm able to make educated decisions to keep myself safe,” says Smith, 21, who lives in St. Louis, Missouri. “But there’s no way I can make an educated decision about what to do to avoid a mass shooting. I've been at home for a year and I'm not as practiced at coping with that fear as I used to be.”
After a year of pandemic lockdowns, public mass shootings are back. For many, the fear of contracting an invisible virus is suddenly compounded by the forgotten yet more familiar fear of getting caught in a random act of violence.
A database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University that tracks mass killings — defined as four or more dead, not including the shooter — showed just two public mass shootings in 2020. Since Jan. 1, there have been at least 11.
Yet while mass shootings dropped out of the headlines, the guns never went away. Instead, even as the U.S. inches toward a post-pandemic future, guns and gun violence feel more embedded in the American psyche than ever before. The fear and isolation of the past year have worked their way into every aspect of the U.S. conversation on firearms, from gun ownership to inner-city violence to the erosion of faith in common institutions meant to keep us safe.
MORE GUN OWNERS, AND DIFFERENT
More than 21 million people completed a background check to buy a gun last year, shattering all previous records, and a survey found that 40% identified as new gun owners — many of whom belong to demographics not normally associated with firearms, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearm industry trade association. Purchases of guns by Black Americans increased 58% over 2019 and sales to Hispanics went up 46%, the group says.
Gun advocates tie this increase to pandemic anxiety and a loss of faith in the ability of police officers and government institutions at all levels to keep the public safe amid what at first was a little-understood, invisible menace. The eruption of sustained racial injustice protests after the police killing of George Floyd and calls to reduce police funding also contributed to more interest in firearms.
One of those buyers was Charles Blain, a 31-year-old Black man in Houston who purchased a Glock 43 handgun and a shotgun for the first time last year. Blain, who describes himself as a conservative, says "pandemic-related unemployment crime” and repeated calls over the past year to release hundreds of jail inmates because of soaring COVID-19 infections pushed him to buy.
“I was always gun-friendly, but never really felt the need to own one myself,” says Blain, who founded Urban Reform, which helps underserved communities get involved in policy decisions that impact them.
The dramatic rise in firearms ownership represents a “tectonic shift in the conversation on guns," says Mark Oliva, the foundation's director of public affairs.
“For these people, gun ownership and gun control was until now a rhetorical debate. It was something you could discuss at a cocktail hour, but they had no skin the game — and then they bought guns,” he says.
“It's hard to put today's gun owner into a box,” Oliva added.
Gun rights advocates feel good about what this could mean for gun policy, with a broader swath of society seeing themselves when they hear about gun control efforts.
At the same time, gun-related homicides in midsized and big cities in America have skyrocketed during coronavirus, and criminologists believe the pandemic and the socioeconomic loss in many communities are factors driving that trend.
A study by the Council on Criminal Justice tracked a 30% increase in homicides overall in a sample of 34 U.S. cities in 2020 as well as an 8% increase in gun assaults.
