The United States had over 40,000 gun deaths during President Joe Biden’s first year of presidency, prompting gun violence survivors to call on the Democratic president to take bigger steps on gun control.
Student-led advocacy group March For Our Lives (M4OL), in a statement, said, “We are horrified by the escalating epidemic of gun violence that has continued under his watch.”
“As a candidate, the president pledged to end the epidemic of gun violence, but as our leader in the White House, he has simply tinkered at the edges, rather than coordinating a whole-of-government response that treats this crisis like the emergency that it is,” said the group, which was created by survivors of the 2018 Parkland school shooting.
There were a total of 44,868 gun deaths in the US in 2021 during Biden’s first year in the White House, according to the Gun Violence Archives (GVA). In comparison, the country saw 15,727 deaths in 2017 during former President Donald Trump’s first year as president.
In 2019, GVA started to track suicide gun deaths, which account for nearly 24,000 deaths per year. Factoring in those figures, the total number of gun violence deaths in 2017 is likely to fall closer to 39,727, which means Biden’s first year in the White House saw a 12 percent rise in gun deaths in comparison to Trump’s.
In its statement, M4OL urged Biden to appoint a cabinet-level Director of Gun Violence Prevention to lead the White House’s efforts to tackle gun violence.
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“On the President’s anniversary, at the conclusion of one of the most deadly years for gun violence in our nation’s history, we must ask the President bluntly: Mr. President, have you done enough?” the group asked.
According to the latest data by the GVA, some 400 Americans were killed in gun violence only in the first four days of 2022.
The United States saw a record high of 691 mass shootings in 2021 as gun violence surged within the year, according to reports.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated that a record number of 17 million guns were sold from January 2021 through November of 2021.
