In 2020, the U.S. recorded its highest increase in rates of homicide in modern history, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Provisional data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released on Wednesday, shows the homicide rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020, and stood at 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people in 2020 compared to 6 per 100,000 in 2019.
While the initial release of the NCHS preliminary data did not provide a total number of homicides committed in 2020, it is consistent with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report released at the end of September, which recorded about 21,570 murders total last year — compared 16,425 murders in 2019. The observers note that while the FBI report is the most official outlook of crime across the U.S., the data it provides is incomplete since not all of the law enforcement agencies submit their crime stats. For example, in 2020, about 2,125 agencies out of more than 18,000 did not submit their data to the FBI.
It is also observed that because of the significant lag time between when the data is released and the timeframe it covers, the data from such large cities as New York, Chicago and New Orleans did not make it on time to be included in the report. Which means, the real numbers may be much higher, given that Chicago‘s homicide rate jumped 56% in 2020, which translates into 772 lost lives. In New York, the number of murders jumped in one year by 44% from 319 to 462.
According to the CBS, the NCHS researchers plan to conduct follow-up analyses on the recent data for “more insight into how the homicides occurred.” It is reported that the provisional data did not document the various mechanisms of homicide, but the researchers outlined that “provisional data on gun-related deaths also increased last year, climbing from a rate of 11.9 firearm deaths per 100,000 in 2019 to 13.6 per 100,000 in 2020 — a 14% increase.”
This focus on gun-related homicides is not surprising, since in April President Joe Biden declared a “gun violence public health epidemic” and announced multiple executive orders to curb it. In June, Biden introduced a new gun-control crusade that would focus on strengthening background checks, banning “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines,” and boosting community policing.
Biden’s chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci quickly parroted his boss. “How can you say that’s not a public health issue,” Fauci said, referring to the surging shootings across the Democrat-run cities.
In August, the CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated in an exclusive CNN interview that gun violence was a “serious public health threat.”
In a bid to address the issue, the CDC is spending $2,224,482 to fund a surveillance mechanism in ten states that tracks the number of people coming into emergency rooms with nonfatal gunshot wounds. The mechanism also records the intent of the injury and shows whether it was self-inflicted, unintentional, or related to an assault. Because, per Walensky, “We don’t even know who enters the emergency department, in most places, as a result of firearm injury.”
In addition to that, the CDC invests some $8,085,935 in research projects trying to get a better understanding of such issues as the characteristics of firearm violence; the risk and protective factors for interpersonal and self-directed firearm violence; and the effectiveness of interventions to prevent firearm violence, per the CDC website.
Walensky said much of CDC’s research will be directed at the discovery of the root causes of gun violence. Per the CNN:
“Oftentimes these will be escalating events that occur that might lead to a suicide or a homicide, and what we really need to do is understand the root causes of that,” Walensky said. “The firearm injury is probably the most distal part of what happens. It is the end event. What are the 10, 12, 15 things where we could have intervened before that singular event?”
While the nation’s top public health “experts” try to figure out why the homicides trended steadily downward from the early 1990s through 2019 and “all of a sudden” surged in 2020, most Americans can recall that the surge of the violent crime seen last year coincided with the “racial justice” protests and draconian COVID-related lockdowns imposed on millions of Americans.
Incited by the Marxist organizations Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa, the destructive riots, urban disorder, and “Defund the Police” activism roiled America last summer and in some places, like Portland, continued for much longer. The connection between the increased murder rates and BLM protests has been demonstrated, among others, by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst study that showed the cities where the protests took place saw a 10 percent increase in murders, equaling 1,000 to 6,000 additional murders nationwide.
Cities that defunded their police departments saw a dramatic increase in violent crimes, too.
Then, many of the states went into a lockdown mode over the “novel and deadly coronavirus.” But it was not the virus that imposed the lockdowns, it was the local authorities that ruthlessly shut down schools and businesses, creating a fertile ground for crime.
“Most prominent is the fact that millions of Americans were suddenly out of work or school, thereby lacking structure in their daily lives. Idleness provided far too many opportunities for conflict and too much free time. For example, despite lockdowns, street gangs remained active, resulting in a 62% spike in gang-related homicides.”
Because of the closed schools, it was reported that many lower income children were recruited by the gangs, and the juvenile crimes increased by 33 percent.
The outlet also notes that much of violent conflict occurred at home, where “extended periods of close contact, boredom and economic hardship” led to home homicides rising by 26%.
Don’t people at the CDC remember it all?
To save the CDC millions of the taxpayers’ dollars in researching root causes of the gun violence and designing the solutions, it would be recommended by this author to follow this easy guidance: provide people with economic opportunities and jobs; maintain law and order by respecting citizens’ Second Amendment rights; maintain well-funded police, and don’t let the Soros-funded attorneys release violent criminals. That would be a good start to slow down the crime.
Most probably, though, the CDC would come up with some “breakthrough” idea like “Please give up your guns for 15 days to stop the spread of violence,” and the Biden administration would be happy to try and implement it. Because of “science.”
