Stray bullets kill bystanders and shootings increase in the United States

A baby in the car seat, a man in his bed, a girl walking with her mother: each of them died from stray bullets just days apart and at a time when gun violence is raging in the United States.

In addition to record numbers of suicides and homicides in various cities across the country, an unknown number of people are killed by bullets that were not intended for them.

Those deaths briefly spark media and police attention, as do mass shootings, but then attention dwindles until the next tragedy.

“It happens very often,” said Chris Herrmann, a gun violence expert at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If that happened in another country, it would be front page news,” he added.

On January 16, Matthew Willson, a 31-year-old British astrophysicist, was sleeping at his girlfriend’s house in Atlanta when he was woken up by the sound of gunshots and was fatally wounded shortly thereafter.

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“It is impossible to understand how this can be true,” his sister Kate told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Almost a week later, Kerri Gray was driving with her six-month-old son when she heard a noise and two cars sped by.

“There was no broken glass. There were no screams. It was an instant,” he told reporters after the death of his little one.

Melissa Ortega, 8, was walking down a Chicago street on January 22 when a man shot at another but killed her.

“He took away my purpose for existing. The reason I got up every day. He stripped me of a life full of dreams,” lamented Araceli Leanos, mother of the minor, to the Univisión TV channel.

The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said they do not track deaths from stray bullets in the United States, where annually some 40,000 people die by firearms, in most cases suicides.

“Bullet in his head”

Official statistics differentiate between accidental and intentional deaths, but not regarding the exact circumstances of the events.

Herrmann estimates that deaths from stray bullets are between 1 and 2% of all deaths from firearms and the number increases or decreases based on the number of mass shootings.

“When shootings went up 10%, you saw a 10% increase in unwanted targets,” he said, explaining that he lamented the official term “targets” as dehumanizing.

The problem of gun violence in the United Statess increased since the start of the pandemic and protests for racial justice in 2020 and at the end of 2021 record numbers of homicides were reported in big cities like Philadelphia, Austin, Columbus and Indianapolis.

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Although the national homicide rate remains below the peaks of the 1980s and 1990s, this increased in 2020 at a rate not seen since national records were kept, in 1960.

Weapons in the hands of novices

At the same time, firearms sales set a record in 2020 with nearly 23 million guns sold, followed by nearly 20 million in 2021, according to consultancy Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting.

Millions of these guns ended up in the hands of novice owners who lack safety training, experts say. “Too many inexperienced people handling weapons is always a recipe for disaster”said Peter Squires, professor of criminology at the University of Brighton in the UK.

This avalanche of weapons can also unleash a hail of shots into the air at parties or special dates. “But the bullets fall and hit people often a mile away from where the gun was fired,” the expert explained.

However, it is the bullets intended for other people that cause a large number of victims.

Tiffani Evans, 34, was outside a relative’s home in Maryland, not far from Washington DC, enjoying dinner on a warm August night when her son Peyton was killed by a stray bullet.

The 8-year-old boy was inside the house eating and playing video games when the shooting began as part of a violent dispute in which the boy had nothing to do.

He was “sitting at the table with his head down, with a bullet in his head,” his mother recalls.

Evans considers that this type of violence has its origin in a series of problems such as the lack of government resources to keep young people on the right path, as well as the failure of parents to teach about the value of human life, added to the illegal possession of firearms in the country.

“There is too much access to illegal weapons,” he added. “We have to put a stop to it. The government has to control this” (I)