Gun deaths in US surged in 2020, data shows. North Carolina’s spike was even bigger

The coronavirus pandemic changed nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives in 2020, from the way we buy groceries to how we say goodbye to sick loved ones taking their final breaths alone in hospital units.

Tucked in the spaces between, 2020 was also a year of extreme gun violence.

The number of gun-related deaths in the United States jumped 25% last year compared to 2019, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence nationwide.

Philip J. Cook, a professor of public policy at Duke University, said it is the largest increase since experts started keeping track of the statistics in the early 1930s.

In North Carolina, the figure is even higher, with a 31% increase in gun deaths.

“2020 became the most violent year of the 21st century,” Cook told McClatchy News. “It looks like that is also true for North Carolina.”

Cook, who has been researching gun violence in the country since the 1970s, said no one knows why there’s been a sudden surge. But some people have speculated that several factors were at play, including the upending of young people’s lives by COVID-19, an uptick in gun sales and a possible shift in police practices after a summer marked by protests.

In 2020, 670 people in North Carolina died as a result of guns, up from 511 the prior year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The figure includes accidental shootings, shootings in self defense and officer-involved shootings.

It does not include suicides, which account for the majority of gun deaths in a given year, according to a report by North Carolinians Against Gun Violence.

Gun injuries in North Carolina also climbed about 13% in 2020, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows.

But Cook said that figure is likely much higher.

“From what we know about non-fatal shootings that come out of an assault situation ... there is about four of those for every fatality,” Cook said. “For some reason, the ratio is two to one in the Gun Violence Archive. (Meaning) they are missing half or more of the non-fatal shootings.”

Also staggering is the leap in mass shootings during a time of stay-at-home orders and remote work.

Mass shootings nearly doubled in North Carolina last year, from 11 in 2019 to 20 in 2020. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as four or more individuals shot and/or killed in a single event at the same general time and location, not including the shooter.

The mass shootings happened across the state, from small towns to the largest city.

A few weeks before Christmas, six people were shot and injured at a bonfire party in the Eastern North Carolina town of Autryville, home to about 200 people, data shows.

In Charlotte, four people were killed and at least five others injured after unknown assailants opened fire at a June block party with nearly 400 people in attendance, The Charlotte Observer reported. Some people were hit by cars as they tried to run for safety while the gunmen fired off more than 100 rounds. No arrests have been made.

“Bullets were coming from everywhere,” community activist Gemini Boyd told The Observer at the time. “It was just chaotic.”

The deadliest mass shooting in the state last year occurred in the rural Chatham County community of Moncure, when Larry Ray shot and killed six of his family members who lived within a few hundred yards of each other before turning the gun on himself, The News & Observer reported.

Homicide rates and gun violence hit an all-time high in the early 1990s, a spike researchers attribute to the crack cocaine epidemic that swept the United States at the time. Homicides fell by half over the next two decades, culminating in a record low in 2014, Cook said.

The same held true for North Carolina, which experienced a low point in gun violence from 2010 to 2014, he said.

Since then, Cook said, the U.S. has experienced a kind of “upward creep,” punctuated by a massive leap in 2020.

“We’re not back all the way to where we were in the early ’90s, but we’re getting there,” he said. “Whether 2020 will prove to be a unique year when it comes to violence or whether it will be just part of a continuing pattern — no one knows.”

At its peak in 1993, the number of deaths attributed to gun-related homicides and police shootings in North Carolina hit 621, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It fell to 378 in 2010 before creeping back up to 582 in 2016, the data shows.

An upward trend in gun violence is reflected in some of North Carolina’s largest cities.

Police in Charlotte recorded 121 homicides in 2020, the most since 1993, The Charlotte Observer reported. Among last year’s homicides, 102 involved gunshot wounds.

Greensboro saw a record 61 killings in 2020 — up from 45 in 2019, according to The News & Record.

The overall crime rate and number of homicides fell or stayed nearly the same in Durham and Raleigh, but the number of shootings jumped dramatically.

In Durham, 318 people were shot last year, compared to 189 the prior year, preliminary police data shows, The News & Observer reported.

Raleigh recorded 106 shootings last year, six more than in 2019, according to The N&O.

On the coast, police in Wilmington said there were 22 homicides last year — a 120% increase from 10 homicides in 2019, The Wilmington Star-News reported.

Police chiefs in North Carolina have said many of the shootings in their cities involve young people, including teenagers.

“We are seeing younger people who are victims,” Chief Casandra Deck-Brown told the Raleigh City Council earlier this month, according to The N&O. “We are seeing younger people who are suspects.”

“And not all of them are living to tell the story,” she said.

The lack of structure and routine in young people’s lives as schools shut down during the pandemic could be a contributing factor to the uptick in gun violence, Cook said.

A change in state law in 2019 raised the minimum age from 16 to 18 for a person to be charged an adult for many crimes. That could also be a factor when it comes to gang activity, according to Lt. Michael Pettit with the High Point Police Department, WGHP reported in January.

“You’ve got some groups who are taking advantage of that and using these younger guys to pull the trigger,” Petitt said, according to the station.

The report by North Carolinians Against Gun Violence also notes the disproportionate impact gun deaths have on Black and Native American communities in North Carolina — at least 67% of homicides in 2018 were among Black, non-Hispanic North Carolinians. Native Americans, meanwhile, had the highest homicide rate in the state for seven years between 2008 and 2018.

Some people have attributed the rise in gun violence in part to police “disengaging in some cities” in response to the rapid spread of COVID-19 or mass demonstrations pushing for police reform, Cook said.

The death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in the custody of Minneapolis police in May, set off protests across the country, some of which involved clashes with police.

The spike could also be tied to the rise in gun sales. North Carolina sheriffs and some gun stores reported an increase in permit applications and gun purchases last year — some of them involving first-time buyers, otherseager to stock up on ammo during a year of extreme uncertainty and a presidential election.

But Cook said the shootings that make up the majority of gun deaths in North Carolina “are for the most part not being done by people who go to the sheriff and get a permit to buy their gun.”

Most, he said, are the result of “routine street violence.”