WASHINGTON (CN) — President Joe Biden convened Monday with federal and local leaders to focus on a scourge that has killed tens of thousands of Americans in the last few years, unabated by the global pandemic.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, and we know some things will work, and one of these things that will work is stemming the flow of firearms used to commit violent crimes,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Monday.
Flanked by the leaders of cities experience touched by the carnage — Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, Brooklyn Burrough President Eric Adams and Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose, California — the meeting comes as discourse over police funding continues to flare from coast to coast and the nation’s homicide rate ticked up 25% from 2019 to 2020.
That figure comes from findings by the FBI, which says the nation saw its highest single-year increase in homicides since tracking first started in 1960.
The causes for this are up for considerable debate. Academics like Aaron Chalfin and John MacDonald, assistant professor and professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, recently explored the paradoxical phenomena of gun violence for the Washington Post.
They surmised much like the White House did on Monday, that America has a “unique” problem where economic strife, social stressors and lack of access to public services tell only a sliver of the gun-violence story.
Last month, the Biden administration formally rolled out its strategy to combat gun violence and violent crimes throughout the U.S., proposing that $350 billion of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package passed earlier this year be directed toward state and local law enforcement.
The White House has asked states to spend some of those dollars on police-force replenishment, and specifically on resources that were depleted over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. The administration outlined that this funding should be used to pay overtime to officers who are “directly focused on advancing community policing strategies,” and moreover in regions where gun violence associated with the pandemic has lurched upward.
That includes ramping up prosecution of gun traffickers, “rogue” arms dealers and training a sharper eye on how the federal government can root out gun-trafficking conduits operating in the shadows at a local level.
Nearly 20,000 people in the United States were killed by gunfire in 2020, according to a report from the nonprofit research group Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun deaths including those by homicide, suicide, mass shootings and more.
As of Monday, barely six full months into this year, the archive reports the number of all gun violence deaths now exceeds 23,000. In terms of homicide, the archive counts about 11,000 American deaths while suicides by gun veer toward 13,000. More than 1,000 children, from infancy to age 17, have been killed by gun violence since Jan. 1.
Where lives have not been claimed but injury was sustained, more than 21,000 people have been harmed by a gun this year.
Whether it is analysis from academics or the FBI, unquestionably the pandemic prompted a spike in gun ownership. Notably, however, violent crime overall has not increased in the United States over the last two decades, according to the Pew Research Center.
Much of the administration’s earmarking of additional resources for state and local law enforcement is focused on regions hard hit by Covid-19, and that is because the funding is not new money added but from the same pandemic relief pool.
The Treasury Department is, however, expressly encouraged to give funding to “any community” that can use it to tamp down on gun violence, and with an amount “up to the level of revenue loss the jurisdiction experienced during the pandemic," according to a White House fact sheet.
