A six-year-old girl dies in a shootout. In Chicago there are 14 people. There are three bodies lying on a golf course, including a professional golfer, with a bullet in their heads. The balance of violence on the bank holiday weekend in the USA is staggering.
The police from Kennesaw, Georgia, found three bodies on a golf course – one of the victims is the well-known professional golfer Gene Siller. The officers found him with a gunshot wound to the head. He died on the spot. In a pick-up truck in the immediate vicinity were the bodies of two other people – they too had gunshot wounds. Media reports, citing witnesses, that the truck drove onto the golf course and that golfer Siller wanted to see what had happened. He was shot in the process.
150 dead in one weekend
The victims are just three of at least 150 people who were shot dead on the national holiday weekend around July 4th, according to the. Four children, including a six-year-old girl, died in Norfolk, Virginia. 83 people were shot in Chicago, including a six-year-old and a five-year-old, and 14 people died. Two police officers were among the injured.
The number of deaths from firearms has been rising sharply in the USA for years. While there were around 12,000 people in 2012 (without suicides), their number was more than 15,000 in 2020 – the number of injuries is roughly twice as high. According to the Washington White House, homicides increased 24 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of last year and 49 percent from 2019.
In New York alone, the police registered 40 percent more incidents with weapons than in the first half of 2020: 767 shootings with 885 victims, according to US media. Chicago has also been experiencing a wave of violence and murder for years, even if the numbers have recently declined slightly, as they are now over the weekend. Conservative politicians accuse the Democratic mayors who rule both Chicago (Lori Lightfoot) and New York City (Bill de Blasio) of being too lax towards criminals. In the east coast metropolis, the next mayor will be elected in 2022, currently with ex-police officer Eric Adams, a Democratic candidate who advertises “safe roads for New York” is in the lead.
Further no tightening of the laws
US President Joe Biden is also concerned with the subject of gun violence. He himself and many of his party friends have long been calling for stricter regulations for the possession of pistols and rifles, but the resistance to this is huge. In addition, the sovereignty over this lies with the individual states, so that Washington has only limited influence anyway. Most recently, Biden had presented a new strategy against violent crime. Among other things, the FBI should take stronger action against organized crime and punish arms dealers who sell their products to unauthorized citizens or who do not adequately examine them.
European comparative figures are only available in this form for individual countries. In Sweden, for example, which is far ahead of the EU when it comes to gun violence, there were just under 50 shootings in 2019. The murder rate there was 1.08 in 2017 – that is, 1.08 people per 100,000 die at the hands of others. Across Europe, the rate was 0.7 (Germany 0.44), in the USA it was 5.32.
Swell:, DPA, AFP, “”, Gun Violence Archive, “” , , “”,
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