According to research reported in the scientific journal Plos One, homicides with guns increased by 39 percent among black men in that period, highlighting a bleak statistic associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Over the past four decades, firearm injuries have disproportionately affected certain demographic groups in society, the authors, Henry Xiang, M.D., of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and Lindsay Young, of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, wrote.

‘The United States should treat violence and injuries resulting from gun violence as a national health priority,’ they added.

Young and Xiang analyzed data from 1981 to 2020 on mortality rates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and compared them across racial groups and genders.

In the United States, they concluded, about 60 percent of suicides involve firearms, as do 36 percent of homicides.

In men, they added, murder rates were five times higher than in women, while the number of suicides in men was seven times higher than in women.

Efforts to prevent deaths by firearms must take into account the demographics of those most affected, for which, they estimated, it is also necessary to dismantle structural racism in the nation in order to address these differences.

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