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Robert L Hawkins, Guns and the Culture of Violence in America, Social Work Research, Volume 48, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 3–7, https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/svae001
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October 26, 2023, early in the morning, the news was playing in the background as I prepared my morning coffee. The commentator said something along the lines of, “There have been nearly 600 mass shootings in the United States.” It was the day after the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, where 18 people were killed in a bowling alley and restaurant (Associated Press, 2023). My initial thought was that it was disturbing but not surprising. At that point, the United States had already experienced more high-profile shootings than most can remember. But there was something about hearing that there were nearly 600 mass shootings so far in 2023. I would later discover that, by that day in October, the exact number of mass shootings on that day in October was 565 (Alfonseca, 2023). There had only been 299 days in the year.
Little did I know that on that same Tuesday, there would be another mass shooting in North Carolina, where five individuals were murdered (Duncan, 2023), and then the next day, two other shootings occurred, one in Arkansas and the other in Ohio (Gun Violence Archive, 2023; Hunnell, 2023). By November, the number would surpass 600, putting 2023 on track to have the most mass shootings on record. For perspective, there are about 393 million guns in the United States, meaning there are more firearms than people (Ingraham, 2018). The United States is also statistically the country with the highest number of firearms deaths in the world among countries with populations of 10 million, with roughly 49,000 gun deaths annually (Gramlich, 2023). More than half of those deaths are suicides. In short, the United States stands alone in the world as the leader in mass shootings, gun violence, and firearm ownership (Lopez, 2022).
