NewsRescue
The United States has seen 201 mass shootings in the first 128 days of 2023, according to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, during a news briefing on Monday, citing “leading accounts.”
The 201st mass shooting of the year occurred Saturday in an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, killing eight people and injuring seven more.
“According to credible estimates, more than 14,000 people have died as a result of gun violence this year.” This is a disaster. “This is a crisis that Republicans in Congress refuse to address,” Jean-Pierre remarked.
She urged Congress to approve gun control legislation that had previously failed to attract bipartisan parliamentary support, blaming Republicans for the escalating violence that she claimed was sweeping the country.
Jean-Pierre declared that Congress should ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, eliminate legal immunity for gun manufacturers, require “safe storage” of guns and ammo, and enact universal background checks, lamenting that President Joe Biden had issued two dozen executive orders restricting the sale and use of firearms, but Congress had not responded with gun control legislation of its own.
Republicans presently hold a narrow majority in the House, while Democrats control the Senate. Biden’s party controlled both chambers until the 2022 midterm elections.
Jean-Pierre’s mass shooting figures appear to be taken from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incidence in which a “minimum of four victims are shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.”
Suicide deaths account for 57% of the 14,836 gun deaths reported by the Gun Violence Archive for 2023, accounting for around 66 of the 115 gun deaths recorded every day. According to the Archive, the number of mass shootings decreased from 690 in 2021 to 647 last year.
A mass shooting is commonly defined by the FBI as one in which four or more individuals are killed. According to such criteria, there have been around 21 this year. According to the FBI, the number of “active shooter” incidents in the United States fell from 61 to 50 in 2022 compared to 2021. While the total number of individuals shot rose from 243 to 313, the number of people died fell from 103 to 100.
Last year, Biden signed a gun control package into law, providing states with $750 million in cash to establish “red flag” laws, tighten background checks, and prohibit “straw buyers,” the practise of purchasing a gun for someone who would otherwise fail a background check. The new laws have had no discernible impact on the rate of shootings in the United States.