Our analysis of 10 years of Gun Violence Archive data, available for the first time, found that deaths are up 50% and injuries are up 66% since 2014.

Half of all shootings occurred outside large cities.

Someone in the rural South is more likely to be shot than someone in L.A. More than 167,000 people were fatally shot between 2014 and 2023, according to @GunDeaths data.

That’s nearly twice the number of Americans who have died in all foreign wars since World War II.

Another 324,000 people were injured. thetrace.org/2024/03/gun-vi…

6 years ago today, 17 people were killed and 17 others were wounded in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Today also marks 16 years since someone opened fire in an oceanography class at Northern Illinois University, killing 5 people and injuring 21 others.

We've heard for years that we don't know exactly how many guns there are in America. So I decided to try to find out.

I dug through old ATF reports for gun production + import data and found that 465 million guns have entered the U.S. market since 1899.

That's not all I found🧵 Some trends became clear:

• The biggest year-over-year jump in production was 2019-2020, when a pandemic-related surge saw 40M guns sold.

• Gun production soared after the election of our first Black president — up 152% since 2008 — and hasn't gone down since.

The St. Louis school shooter was able to get a gun because nothing he did violated Missouri law — not because police missed multiple red flags or "gun laws don't work."

Missouri has relaxed laws to the point where someone who's been involuntarily committed can still get a gun 🧵 As @stltoday reports, the gunman had been committed before the Oct. 24 shooting. So when he tried to buy a gun, he failed the background check.

According to federal law, a person can't possess a gun if they've been involuntarily committed stltoday.com/news/local/cri…

The Brooklyn shooting suspect bought a Glock from a federally licensed gun dealer in Ohio in 2011. He had no felonies, so he was able to legally purchase a gun.

The NRA will say, "See? Gun laws don't work."

But maybe more than a criminal background check should be required. In other countries, gun buyers undergo interviews + mental health assessments, are required to get character references + pass exams—basically prove they understand what a serious responsibility gun ownership is.

In most U.S. states, we have none of that nytimes.com/interactive/20…

@SethAbramson Tell me the cops didn't leave bottles of water for these guys. Tell me the water was meant for someone else @SethAbramson If they did, it's really rich because undercover cops in Louisville destroyed water bottles belonging to peaceful protesters this past summer

https://twitter.com/nataliealund/status/1266877181164089349

I'm the lead researcher on a project we just launched at @teamtrace called #SinceParkland, where student journalists across the U.S. wrote profiles of their peers who died by gun since the Stoneman Douglas shooting.

Compiling the data was painstaking. sinceparkland.org Every day for 8 months I consulted @GunDeaths and searched for people 18 and younger who were fatally shot. We used 18 as the cutoff age because Meadow Pollack, who died in Parkland, was 18. gunviolencearchive.org