San Jose Shooting: UC Davis Gun Violence Expert Warns ‘We Are Likely To Have A Rough Summer’
As America awakens from the COVID-19 pandemic, incidents of gun violence like Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Jose at a VTA rail yard will be on the rise across the country, a leading expert on gun violence warned.
“Rates of violence rose in 2020; homicide increased by 20% or more in many large and small cities, in some cases to rates not seen in a generation,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, a long time emergency room physician at the UC Davis Medical Center and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program. “There was an unprecedented surge in firearm purchases, and up through the middle of last year, the size of the increase in violence was proportional to the size of the increase in firearm purchasing.”