Why surge in US gun sales? Job loss, COVID social disruptions
On Saturday, 13 people were shot, and 10 died in a mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. It’s one of six mass shootings that happened over the weekend, including one locally in Laguna Woods at a Presbytarian church.
“The year-to-year increase we saw from 2019 to 2020 in homicide was the greatest we've ever seen historically, in 100 years of record keeping. … Homicide rates in 2021 were [on average] 45% higher than they were just two years earlier in 2019. And 2022 is on pace to exceed 2021,” says Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis.