Study: Nonsuicidal gun violence rose during COVID-19 restrictions

Nonsuicidal gun violence rose in the U.S. during the restrictive first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study in a leading medical journal.

The study of data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found a sharp rise in gun-related deaths and injuries between March 2020 and March 2021 over the previous four years.

In all 50 states and the District of Columbia, gun-related deaths were up 28.4% and injuries 34.3% over similar timeframes before the pandemic. The study excluded suicides and self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

“Pandemic restrictions may have had substantial detrimental effects” on mental health, which fueled a rise in violent crimes, the study’s five researchers said.

They cited National Center for Health Statistics data showing that the national gun-related homicide rate rose from 4.7 per 100,000 Americans in 2019 to 6.4 per 100,000 in 2020.

“Worsening economic conditions, psychological strain and trauma associated with the pandemic, combined with an increase in firearm sales, could potentially increase the risk of firearm violence in association with the pandemic, thus exacerbating another major public health crisis in the US,” the researchers wrote.

Of the 300,000 gun-related incidents between January 2016 and February 2021, the study reported that 62,485 occurred during the first year of the pandemic — about 8,000 more than a typical year during the period.

Those incidents included 40,021 gun-related injuries and 19,818 gun-related deaths during the pandemic, according to the study. The remainder were gun-related threats.

Amy Swearer, a legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the study’s reliance on the Gun Violence Archive means it is using “unreliable data.”

She pointed to the study’s admission that Philadelphia’s police department found a 15% increase in gun violence for that city, compared to a 51% increase in the archive’s data.

Ms. Swearer said the group lumps all murders, unintentional deaths and justified shooting deaths — whether civilian or police — into the same general count.

“It matters whether some of the ‘excess gun violence’ is attributable to increases in lawful defensive gun uses, accidental shootings, or police shootings, as opposed to criminal gun uses,” Ms. Swearer said. “And it doesn’t appear that the authors of the study took any care to distinguish between these sources of gun violence in the dataset.”

The study reported pandemic-era gun violence peaked from June to October 2020 — especially in Minnesota and New York state — but said the trends of firearm violence during the pandemic “remain unclear.” 

The Gun Violence Archive based its data on 7,500 news outlets and public sources, the study reported. It covers reports of nonsuicidal deaths, injuries and threats involving guns.

The researchers conducted the study, titled “Analysis of Firearm Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US,” from April to December 2021.