Bloody January: mass shootings in US
CCTV news client news 2023 has only started for one month, and the United States is shrouded in the bloody shadow of gun violence. In January, a series of mass shootings that caused serious casualties occurred in the United States, making it the month with the largest number of mass shootings in the past five years.
On the first day of 2023, six mass shootings occurred in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and other states in the United States; in January this year, seven vicious shootings occurred in California alone.
According to statistics from the US “Gun Violence Archives” website, as of January 30, there have been 50 mass shootings in the United States in 2023 that have caused at least four deaths and injuries, nearly 3,500 people have died in gun-related incidents, and more than 2,600 people have been killed by guns. Incident injured. According to a national poll conducted last year by the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, 75% of Americans believe gun violence is a “significant problem” and 80% say gun violence is getting worse. In addition, 21% of Americans said that they, their family members or friends had experienced gun violence in the past 5 years, and more than 40% worried that they would become a victim of gun violence in the next 5 years.
The issue of gun control is difficult to solve due to politics and interest groups
Analysts pointed out that gun violence in the United States is intensifying, political polarization, interest groups and other factors make it difficult to solve the problem of gun control. For many years, the issue of gun control has been a focus of the game between politicians of the two parties in the United States. At the same time, anti-gun control organizations represented by the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers behind them have long sent political donations to American politicians in order to block gun control legislation.
The New York Times of the United States recently published an article saying that the successive mass shootings highlighted a political reality on Capitol Hill: even if this series of “massacres” that shocked the entire United States occurred, Congress is unlikely to unite the two parties of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party Consensus, and roll out any new gun control measures. Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at the University of Southern California in the United States, also lamented that the large number of victims of gun violence contrasts sharply with the slow response of American politics, which makes people feel powerless and hopeless.