FEATURE:
A Loaded Question
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Can Music Help End America’s Disturbing Obsession with Guns?
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ONE of the world’s impossible problems to solve…
PHOTO CREDIT: Karolina Grabowska/Pexels
might be gun control in the U.S. There is a gun issue in many nations, yet with the size of the population, the sheer number of people who own firearms across the country, coupled with the number of fatalities each year, America is leading a very unsettling race! Those with guns often see it as protection. The fact that everyone has the right to bear arms and protect themselves. That Constitutional right that seems irreversible and prehistoric. Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center presented some very worrying and alarming statistics when it came to guns-related injuries and deaths:
“More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2021 than in any other year on record, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That included record numbers of both gun murders and gun suicides. Despite the increase in such fatalities, the rate of gun deaths – a statistic that accounts for the nation’s growing population – remained below the levels of earlier decades.
Here’s a closer look at gun deaths in the United States, based on a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the CDC, the FBI and other sources. You can also read key public opinion findings about U.S. gun violence and gun policy.
How many people die from gun-related injuries in the U.S. each year?
In 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were accidental, those that involved law enforcement and those whose circumstances could not be determined. The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)
What share of U.S. gun deaths are murders and what share are suicides?
Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).
What share of all murders and suicides in the U.S. involve a gun?
About eight-in-ten U.S. murders in 2021 – 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81% – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. More than half of all suicides in 2021 – 26,328 out of 48,183, or 55% – also involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001.
How has the number of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?
The record 48,830 total gun deaths in 2021 reflect a 23% increase since 2019, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Gun murders, in particular, have climbed sharply during the pandemic, increasing 45% between 2019 and 2021, while the number of gun suicides rose 10% during that span.
The overall increase in U.S. gun deaths since the beginning of the pandemic includes an especially stark rise in such fatalities among children and teens under the age of 18. Gun deaths among children and teens rose 50% in just two years, from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.
How has the rate of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?
While 2021 saw the highest total number of gun deaths in the U.S., this statistic does not take into account the nation’s growing population. On a per capita basis, there were 14.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2021 – the highest rate since the early 1990s, but still well below the peak of 16.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 1974.
The gun murder rate in the U.S. remains below its peak level despite rising sharply during the pandemic. There were 6.7 gun murders per 100,000 people in 2021, below the 7.2 recorded in 1974.
The gun suicide rate, on the other hand, is now on par with its historical peak. There were 7.5 gun suicides per 100,000 people in 2021, statistically similar to the 7.7 measured in 1977. (One caveat when considering the 1970s figures: In the CDC’s database, gun murders and gun suicides between 1968 and 1978 are classified as those caused by firearms and explosives. In subsequent years, they are classified as deaths involving firearms only.)
Which states have the highest and lowest gun death rates in the U.S.?
The rate of gun fatalities varies widely from state to state. In 2021, the states with the highest total rates of gun-related deaths – counting murders, suicides and all other categories tracked by the CDC – included Mississippi (33.9 per 100,000 people), Louisiana (29.1), New Mexico (27.8), Alabama (26.4) and Wyoming (26.1). The states with the lowest total rates included Massachusetts (3.4), Hawaii (4.8), New Jersey (5.2), New York (5.4) and Rhode Island (5.6)
The results are somewhat different when looking at gun murder and gun suicide rates separately. The places with the highest gun murder rates in 2021 included the District of Columbia (22.3 per 100,000 people), Mississippi (21.2), Louisiana (18.4), Alabama (13.9) and New Mexico (11.7). Those with the lowest gun murder rates included Massachusetts (1.5), Idaho (1.5), Hawaii (1.6), Utah (2.1) and Iowa (2.2). Rate estimates are not available for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont or Wyoming.
The states with the highest gun suicide rates in 2021 included Wyoming (22.8 per 100,000 people), Montana (21.1), Alaska (19.9), New Mexico (13.9) and Oklahoma (13.7). The states with the lowest gun suicide rates were Massachusetts (1.7), New Jersey (1.9), New York (2.0), Hawaii (2.8) and Connecticut (2.9). Rate estimates are not available for the District of Columbia”.
It seems hardly a week goes by without the news reporting on a mass shooting or murder via firearm. This idea that people need to protect themselves. Even feeling that, if nobody else had guns, then they would still feel vulnerable. It is a horrible mindset that means we are seeing so many needless deaths each year. I am going to expand about music and how it can at least send messages out regarding gun violence and bringing it to an end (or nearer than it has been for many decades). The Guardian recently reported how a group of artists have formed a coalition against gun violence. It has come to a time when politicians are still unable to come to an agreement. A nation divided over an issue that should be simple to eradicate. So many unwilling to change the laws on gun ownership. It must be terrifying and infuriating living in the U.S. and feeling unsafe:
“Billie Eilish, Peter Gabriel, Sheryl Crow and a host of other artists have joined forces for a new coalition against gun violence.
Artist for Action to Prevent Gun Violence is a new “non-political” organisation aimed at inspiring Americans to act together through volunteering and ultimately voting to eliminate the epidemic that has already killed over 37,000 people in the US this year alone. Early estimates suggest that it could be the deadliest year yet.
“As a community of artists, we need to band together to make common sense change,” Eilish said in a statement. Gabriel added: “This needs to stop. So many needless deaths. So much suffering. It just needs a little common sense.”
Other artists also involved include Sheryl Crow, Nile Rodgers, Rufus Wainwright, Bootsy Collins, Sofi Tukker and The Pixies.
The official launch will roll out with a series of live events, kicking off with Bush and special guests in New York on 22 September.
IN THIS PHOTO: Billie Eilish performing at Leeds Festival in 2023/PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Baker/Getty Images for ABA
“As a father, I am staggered by the gun violence in America, and as a musician, I am fortunate enough to be able to take a stand against it,” Bush’s Gavin Rossdale said. “This is a human rights crisis out of control. There have been more than 400 mass shootings in the US in 2023 – from stores to football games to parades to schools. Every person, especially children, deserves the right to be and feel safe.”
It is led by Mark Barden, a musician and father of one of the 26 children murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. “After my son Daniel was murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school, I put my career as a professional guitarist on hold to devote myself to preventing gun violence,” Barden said. “Please join me and hundreds of other artists, musicians, actors, athletes and people like you to finally end this senseless violence.”
December will also see the release of a film, executive produced by Crow, which tells Barden’s story.
Eilish has often shown support for improved gun control, releasing a statement on Instagram in 2019 asking her followers to support gun safety non-profit Everytown”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Chuck D in London in 2017/PHOTO CREDIT: David Levene/The Guardian
Music has an amazing power and influence. Popular artists have this platform whether they can reach millions of people. I hope that the new coalition gets social media support and more artists join. I will finish with the power of songs and whether music can lead to social and political change. Gun violence is an issue that also affects music. Rap and Hip-Hop especially. In another article from The Guardian, Public Enemy’s Chuck D talked about his new graphic novel and the madness of U.S. gun culture:
“And he interprets everything, from the raw pain of mass shootings to climate change, to the war in Ukraine to the Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s the “Disunited State of America” he decries in one of the images.
Some themes are depicted in portraits and feature prominent people such as Salman Rushdie, Jay-Z, even the Pope.
Urban backdrops sketched in black and white lines capture an apocalyptic-looking America, from the Bronx in New York to Jackson, Mississippi.
“People are confused and angry,” he says. “Only last week a black woman was shot down because she was shoplifting. She was just shoplifting! And it was the police!” he bawls.
As a rapper, gun violence is the issue that impacts Chuck D the most. “Too many rappers have been lost to shootings,” he says, recalling his friend Jam Master Jay in 2002 and Young Dolph in 2021. At least 75% of hip-hop deaths have been from guns, he says. “It’s a sickness and an epidemic that has permeated and come out through the music.”
He acknowledges the inevitability that hip-hop is cast as a sort of musical pariah whenever there is a shooting involving a rapper.
“That’s the danger,” he says.
Guns and hip-hop, guns and God, they are complicated, divisive subjects in America, he suggests, but that’s also the reason he’s tackling them in the new book”.
Music and the messages artists put out can be incredibly influential and powerful. Able to be political and inspire minds, can artists get America out of its centuries-long obsession with guns?! I found an article from earlier this year from The New York Times, where Ketch Secor, a founding member and the lead singer of Old Crow Medicine Show (and a Grammy-winning musician who lives in Nashville), wrote why Country music can lead the U.S. out of its quagmire and division:
“They say we love our guns down South, and it’s true they are part of the pageantry of our beloved Southland, in tune with the equally nostalgic heartstrings we pull for mother, God, freedom and country. Country music plays a central role in forming the South’s gun mythology, from songs like “Big Iron” to “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Seven nights a week in Nashville, you can hear any number of country upstarts remind the tourists in the honky-tonk bars on Lower Broad that Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno “just to watch him die.”
But all the parents in Nashville, including me, know what they were doing shortly after 10 a.m. on Monday, March 27. When shots rang out inside Nashville’s Covenant School and three adults and three children were murdered, the tragedy exposed the deep hypocrisy of a musical genre at once so beholden to Christian principles and yet so unwilling to stand for peace. The 377th school shooting since Columbine happened on a Christian campus in Nashville and, as a musician, writer and historian, I now believe that country music has a unique opportunity to shepherd conservative Southerners, a demographic essential to the passage of any meaningful legislation, to the table to negotiate gun reform.
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Zisiga Mukulu/The New York Times; photographs by alxpin/Getty Images and The New York Public Library
My band, Old Crow Medicine Show, which first struck up a tune in Nashville 25 years ago and was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2013, has always played a fringe role on the country scene. Though we lean left politically, our signature song, “Wagon Wheel,” has become a mainstream anthem for audiences that consistently lean right. When I hear it blasting from a pickup truck, I often spy an N.R.A. sticker on the bumper. In my experience, country stars tend toward centrism. The right-wing groups we most often encounter are not our bandmates but our audiences.
What the South needs now is an anti-assault-weapons movement driven by voices from the center, by interdenominational faith leaders, by students — Nashville is called the Athens of the South because it is teeming with scholars at its many colleges — and by country singers who are tired of bending to the whims of fearmongers and who are ready to speak from their platforms to an impressionable audience.
Conservative musicians are always vocal when it comes to the culture wars, but stars with moderate views tend not to weigh in publicly. The motive is genuine: We don’t want to offend anyone. But in times as dire as these, silence is complicity. It’s time for country music makers to use their platforms to speak candidly to their conservative audiences. Our outrage needs to move from the green room to center stage.
Now that the tragedy of school gun violence has come to Nashville, our city is poised to help lead the nation toward effective regulations such as red-flag and safe-storage laws, a ban on military-grade weapons, stricter background checks and the repeal of permitless carry laws.
Exactly one week after the shooting at Covenant School, the students of Episcopal School of Nashville — a school I helped found eight years ago on the Judeo-Christian principles of peace, inclusivity and love — walked out of their classrooms, joining a longstanding tradition of peaceful demonstration in our city.
The street that runs past the Ryman Auditorium, the historic home of the Grand Ole Opry, was recently renamed Rep. John Lewis Way, after the civil rights leader who was arrested for the first time while protesting in Nashville. Many architects of the civil rights movement, such as James Lawson and Diane Nash, were active in this city, where the political climate made it more palatable than places further south. What might have gotten you lynched in Alabama or firebombed in Mississippi felt somehow safer in Nashville, a city of church spires and universities.
Nashville remains a bellwether city where right and left can conjoin, where musicians and artists test the boundaries of the South’s social strictures and where Christianity of both deeply evangelical and progressive varieties flourishes”.
With every shocking statistic regarding gun violence across America, the more important it is to highlight the problem and tackle it. There will always be that struggle between the Democrats and Republicans and their stance on gun ownership. Music can be a bigger and more unified force that could help to raise awareness of the problems and devastating impact of gun violence. Spreading messages as to why gun ownership in the U.S. needs to be limited. That we cannot see shockingly high figures of gun-related injuries and death year in year out. I think that, if the music industry joined together and there was this massive protest and musical decrying of gun ownership and the wake people up to the realities of gun violence, then that could help change things. Maybe we will never see a day when all gun violence ends and there is no gun ownership – though a big difference can be made. Many artists have protested in recent years, so there is this real desire from the community for change and peace. So often, gun violence impacts innocent people. There is this struggle between those who feel owning a gun is a right – so they can protect themselves – and those who feel guns breed more violence than they prevent. The staggeringly high number of gun-related deaths should open people’s eyes. And yet, year in year out, these go into the void. I think music can play a big role. Whether Country music, modern Pop icons or legends of the past, this shared desired to severely limit gun ownership and the deaths it causes could become a reality…
IN our lifetime.