Xinhua News
Jul 6, 20214 min
According to data provided by the White House, the number of homicides in the first quarter of 2021 was 24 per cent higher than it was in the same period of 2020 and 49 per cent higher than in the first quarter of 2019.
The Washington Post in a report in June quoted data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive that said 54 people were killed by shootings in the United States every day during the first five months of 2021, 14 more deaths than the average toll during the same period over the previous six years.
On the other hand, though the Biden administration's new anti-crime strategy intends to invest more in police forces - not defund them - by drawing from portions of the 1.9 trillion U.S.-dollar COVID-19 relief package, the focus remains on passing gun control laws, a formidable task given the lack of bipartisan consensus.
In April, the White House announced several executive actions on gun control, including cracking down on "ghost guns," self-made guns which lack serial numbers used to trace them.
As Democrats were pressing for gun control legislation, Republican-dominated states were forging ahead to expand firearm access, with local legislatures managing to remove permit requirements to carry a handgun.
Realizing that such studies would be used as a catalyst for gun safety reforms, the powerful lobbyist group the National Rifle Association (NRA) pressured Congress to kill future federal-funded studies.
In 1996, the NRA succeeded.
Since 1996, the CDC's appropriation bill had explicitly stipulated that none of the funds made available to the agency "may be used to advocate or promote gun control," and the CDC hasn't done any such studies since then.
In 2009, the National Institutes of Health also conducted a similar study which found that a person carrying a gun was about 4.5 times more likely to be shot in conflicts than one without a gun.
Again, two years later restrictive funding for the organization was imposed by Congress.
Yet stringent gun legislation has consistently won majority support from the public.
Aside from some drops during Barack Obama's presidency, support for the "stricter" option had been consistently over 50 per cent since 2000.
In a Morning Consult-Politico tracking poll published in April, researchers found that approximately two in three Americans said they support greater restrictions on gun ownership.
You would think common sense would prevail among U.S. politicians, these self-proclaimed "defenders of democracy and human rights," to follow public opinion and pass gun legislation to protect Americans. Unfortunately, common sense is hard to find in Washington these days.
Source: Xinhua; Editor: Huaxia
Read more from the below TAGS
People also reading-