The number of gun deaths in America hit an all-time high in 2020, owing mostly to an increase in homicides, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A total of 45,222 people died of gunshot wounds — a 14 percent jump from 2019, when there were 39,707 gun deaths, and the largest year-over-year rise on record.

The data, published late last month on the CDC’s interactive WONDER database, demonstrates that the pace of gun violence in the United States is accelerating quickly. Firearm injury is now the 13th leading cause of death, eclipsing car crashes for the fourth year in a row, and by a larger margin than ever before. CDC mortality data is derived from death certificates collected at the state level.

Olga Pierce

The age-adjusted gun death rate in 2020 was 13.6 per 100,000 people — the highest since 1994. 

The steep increase in gun deaths was driven largely by homicides, which spiked 35 percent between 2019 and 2020. Guns were used in a greater proportion of homicides than ever before: 79 percent, up from 74 percent in 2019. 

Suicides, meanwhile, remained relatively steady. Over the last decade, suicides have accounted for more than 60 percent of gun deaths, but made up only 54 percent of gun deaths in 2020.

As in years past, people of color bore the brunt of American gun violence: 42 percent of firearm homicide victims in 2020 were Black males between the ages of 15 and 34, a group that accounts for only 2 percent of the population. Gun homicides of Black women jumped 51 percent in 2020 compared to 2019. 

The South had far and away the highest number of gun deaths (21,552) in 2020, and the Northeast had the lowest number of gun deaths (4,145). The states with the highest rates of gun mortality were Mississippi, Louisiana, and Wyoming, while Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New Jersey had the lowest rates. Washington, D.C., Mississippi, and Louisiana had the highest rates of gun homicide; Wyoming, North Dakota, and Maine had the lowest. 

Criminologists and researchers say it’s too soon to draw firm conclusions about what fueled the rise in gun homicides in 2020, which soared amid the pandemic while nonviolent crime declined. Anti-violence workers and local officials have pointed to a number of factors that may have exacerbated gun violence since the onset of COVID-19, including unemployment, evictions, school closures, domestic strife amid lockdowns, and interruptions to daily routines. Garen Wintemute, the director of the Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis, says the socioeconomic damage wrought by the ancillary effects of the pandemic might continue to fuel firearm homicides long after it’s over.

“The pandemic has, among other things, aggravated the disparities that are structural determinants of violence,” said Wintemute. “Lots of people lost their jobs; those jobs may not come back. Lots of people lost their shot at an education, some of them maybe permanently. So we’re not going to get to turn back the dial and start over. We’re moving forward into territory we’ve never seen before.”

2020’s rise in firearm homicides also coincided with record gun sales, which some researchers have linked to increased gun violence. “What we know about the relationship between firearms and violence in general, it’s almost a truism: More firearms equals more violence,” said Wintemute, who researched this link in the early months of the pandemic.

Guns were used in a greater proportion of homicides than ever before: 79 percent, up from 74 percent in 2019.

John Roman, a leading criminologist at the University of Chicago, wrote in January that elevated levels of violence could be an isolated phenomenon and not necessarily part of an ongoing trend, and might subside along with the pandemic. As the Omicron wave dissipates, “people’s routine activities should return to more usual patterns — patterns established when there was less gun violence,” he wrote.

But Wintemute, who is also treating COVID patients in the emergency room, said “there is no guarantee that the pandemic will subside soon,” because Delta and Omicron could be followed by another variant that’s just as infectious or deadly. Of course, there are other factors that influence shootings, including socioeconomic and sociological factors. For instance, last September, researchers identified a “contagion effect” in three cities (Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia) whereby shootings led to more violence through a combination of social factors, like pressure to retaliate. 

Preliminary data from the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings from media reports, suggests that the upswing in gun violence continued into 2021, with gun deaths roughly approaching the CDC’s 2020 figures.