Comprehensive compilation of Yuan Ye
Kendall Manson was so worried about gun violence on chicago's South Side that he sent his sons to his grandparents' house in Atlanta.
Manson's 11-year-old son, Ilya, is a dimwit and loves to play football. According to the New York Times, on December 9, 2021, Ilya went shopping for snacks with several friends, and his 12-year-old friend took a gun out of his backpack and fiddled with it, accidentally shooting Ilya in the head.
Two weeks before Ilya died, his 5-year-old cousin, Harris Eberhardt, was shot dead in his home — his 3-year-old cousin found a gun under a couch cushion and pulled the trigger by mistake.
"It's too easy for our kids to touch a gun." Manson said, "It happens when you're a kid and you're playing with something you think is a toy." ”
According to the New York Times, the number of minors dying from gunfire in the United States has risen sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the country's 14-year-olds and younger have seen a 50 percent increase in the odds of gun deaths from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020.
In 2021, things seem to be getting worse. According to the open-source database Gun Violence Archives, more than 1,500 minors in the United States will die in homicides and accidental shootings in 2021. In 2020, the number is 1380.
Toddlers find guns under piles of clothes or between couch cushions; teenagers use drawings on the Internet to make hard-to-trace "ghost guns"; middle school students carry pistols for self-protection...
"The same thing happens before our eyes again and again." Police Chief Keith Meadows, South Fulton, Georgia, told The New York Times, "When the outbreak broke out, people came flooding in like a flood to apply for a gun license. People buy weapons without getting the right guidance. "Two children in the city have recently died in accidental shootings, one of them is 5-year-old Eberhart.
In December 2021, Meadows hosted a gun safety class attended by 50 parents, some of whom brought their children to the class. The next day, a 3-year-old boy found a gun under his bed at home and accidentally fired a shot in the stomach, but fortunately saved his life.
The USA Today website reported that most of the shootings occurred in big cities, but in the United States, few places have survived.
With a population of only 22,000 in central Missouri's Cedelia, 4-year-old Andrei Walker found a loaded pistol in his home and killed himself. In Georgia, 17-year-old Deshaoente Hunt was shot dead in a country cemetery.
A 15-year-old gunman killed four teenagers at Oxford High School in Michigan, where local prosecutors charged his parents with manslaughter. Prosecutors said the school had warned the parents that their son had "violent fantasies," but they bought him a pistol as a gift and put it in an unlocked bedroom drawer. But this pair of parents does not consider themselves guilty.
U.S. legal experts say that in most cases, adult gun owners will not be prosecuted, even if their weapons cause child casualties.
"It's like a normal thing." Kim Sepps told The New York Times that in the summer of 2021, his 16-year-old nephew Ramon Sousa and his grandmother were shot dead in Oklahoma City, and a 16-year-old was charged with suspects. The USA Today website quoted FBI data as saying that between 2019 and 2020, the number of people under the age of 20 who committed homicides in the United States increased by nearly 20%. U.S. schools are overwhelmed by the pandemic and have no time to deal with violence against children.
Activists against gun violence say helplessness and anger have taken root in the hearts of Americans.
"Can this be blamed on the epidemic? Can you blame the insanity? How did these guns fall into the hands of small children? Marissa Thomas-St. Clair, an activist in Columbus, Ohio, asked. After a 14-year-old boy shot and killed her two-year-old nephew last year, she co-founded an anti-gun violence group.
The city of Columbus is plagued by gun violence, with 17 minors shot dead last year and 20 in 2020. Activists say local children are afraid to walk home from the bus stop alone.
Families who have lost loved ones marched in anger, and mothers who lost their children organized a vigil at the scene of the murder until one of them was shot dead in the summer of 2021.
2021 in columbus city began with the killing of a pair of little sisters. On January 1, 2021, 9-year-old Ava Williams and 6-year-old Alice were shot and killed by their fathers.
The year ended in a similar event. 9-year-old Dimitrius Volnier loves to play football, and his 6-year-old sister Rondon is always on the sidelines to cheer on her brother. One day in December 2021, when the brothers and sisters were preparing to get into the car with their mother's boyfriend, several people came over and shot at the car, killing all three people.
"How could you kill two children of this age?" Their grandmother, Jessica Jones, told The New York Times while sitting in a bakery. Dimitrius played in the open space outside the store.
"I really don't understand. When will such days end? She said.
Source: China Youth Daily client