September 4, 2021 – In Breaking News – Yahoo News
Londan Hill was sitting at the kitchen table in a family friend’s Cleveland-area home when two bullets ripped through the wall, piercing his neck.
He staggered into the living room before collapsing in front of his mother, blood gushing from his fatal wounds.
He was 13.
(The family and friends of 13-year-old Londan Hill came together Sunday to remember the boy. Londan was shot and killed in Cleveland Heights. Courtesy of WKYC Channel 3 and YouTube. Posted on Aug 15, 2021.)
“He went on a trip and he came back dead,” said Londan’s grandmother, Paris Hill, who lives in Chicago. “He’s a child. He’s a child. He watched the Disney channel. How does a 13-year-old get shot?”
Hill’s Aug. 9 death in Cleveland Heights makes him one of the more than 100 people killed in the Cleveland area so far this year, a sharply higher tally than the 84 homicides for the same period last year.
Both shootings and homicides are up dramatically from last year across the United States due to what experts, activists and family members said is a toxic stew of post-COVID 19 lockdowns, economic uncertainty and a flood of guns.
(Gun violence has spiked across the U.S. since March 2020, creating a parallel public health crisis during the pandemic. It also coincides with growing calls to defund the police. Courtesy of CBC News: The National and YouTube. Posted on Aug 9, 2021.)
Complicating matters: social-media taunting that allows young people to broadcast their intentions, fueling the cycle.
“We’re seeing the same thing every urban community is seeing: Murder is up, violent crime is up,” said Houston police Sgt. Joe Gamaldi.
“We’re seeing it in real-time on the front lines.”
Through Sept. 2, more than 13,700 people had been shot dead in the United States in 2021, a 13% increase compared to the same time in 2020 and a nearly 37% increase compared to that same period in 2019, according to statistics compiled by the Gun Violence Archive.
And it’s not just that there are more shootings.
More people are being shot in each incident, in part due to the availability of extended magazines and easy-to-carry “bullpup” style semi-automatic rifles, said Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun violence nationally using a combination of police statistics and media reports.
According to the group’s statistics, the nation has seen 464 mass shootings — defined as four or more people shot in a single incident — so far in 2021, compared to 386 by this time last year, a 15.5% increase.
For comparison, 2019 had 417 mass shootings in the entire year, according to GVA’s definition.
(Amid a dramatic surge in gun violence in major cities across the country, the White House in June announced a new strategy to address the problems. Courtesy of TODAY and YouTube. Posted on Jun 23, 2021.)
Continue reading… ‘I can’t believe the numbers’: Mass shootings, homicide rates, gun sales hit highest levels since 1990s
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