USA: The attack on the Texas school comes after two years of record sales of weapons

Tuesday’s attack on a Texas elementary school that killed 19 children and two adults came after more than two years of record arms sales across the United States, a trend some researchers attribute to political unrest and pressure. pandemic, as reported by Forbes.

Annual U.S. firearms sales hit a record high of 22.8 million (or 1.9 million per month) in 2020, a jump of 64% from the previous year, followed by a gradual decline to 19.9 million (or 1.66 million). per month) in 2021 and an average of 1.5 million per month in the first four months of this year – still well above pre-pandemic levels, according to research firm Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting.

Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting estimated that 5.9 million firearms were sold in the US in the first four months of 2022 – down from about 7.7 million in the first four months of 2021, but still significantly higher than in 2019, when 4, 6 million firearms were sold during the same period.

About 13.8 million Americans bought guns for the first time in 2020 and 2021, according to a survey of retailers conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an association of the gun industry.

Gun sales are often linked to crises, according to researchers at the Brookings Institution and Wellesley College: Sales first rose in March 2020 after then-President Donald Trump declared a national state of emergency over Covid-19 and caused a pandemic. fears for the economy and public safety, the researchers said.

Sales also rose amid protests over the May 2020 assassination of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, investigators said, adding that an additional 1.4 million firearms were sold in the month following Floyd’s death.

8.8 million: This is the annual average number of firearms produced in the US from 2014 to 2018, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. This includes 3.9 million pistols, 3.4 million rifles, 774,132 revolvers and 752,954 shotguns. The team also estimates that approximately 20 million “modern sporting rifles” (the term for AR-15 and other similar weapons that are particularly popular) were either produced or imported into the United States from 1990 to 2018.

In 2020, gun deaths replaced road accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans aged 1 to 19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. Meanwhile, the number of active shooting incidents reported by the FBI increased from 30 in 2019 to 40 in 2020 and 61 in 2021, while overall gun attacks also increased in the first two years of the pandemic.

This increase in violence may have been caused in part by the psychological and economic pressures of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a September research paper published by the JAMA Network. But the authors of the New England Journal of Medicine analysis also said that the jump in gun deaths was in line with Dickey Amendment, a 1996 law endorsed by the National Arms Association (NRA) that cut federal funding for research on gun violence.

Tuesday’s attack on Uvalde was the deadliest elementary school attack in the United States since Sandy Hook’s attack in Connecticut in 2012, and came less than two weeks after a Buffalo supermarket shooting killed 10 people. In the wake of the Ovalde attack, President Joe Biden called on lawmakers to pass “common law weapons” and defy the arms lobby.