It’s been 10 years since a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown left 20 students and six educators dead. The tragedy put renewed focus on America’s gun laws and on the nation’s massive number of mass shootings.
But the country also struggles with a less-talked-about form of everyday gun violence. In 2020, more than 45,000 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During that same year, nearly 8 in 10 murders involved a firearm, the highest percentage since the late 1960s.
“We are going to hear a lot of stories about Sandy Hook over the next couple of weeks, as we should,” said Jeremy Stein, executive director of CT Against Gun Violence. “But we also need to make sure that we’re talking to those survivors that are in places like New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford – those places that are seeing gun violence on an almost daily basis.”
Stein said that gun death rates in Connecticut are statistically low compared to other states but that “white people in Connecticut are far better protected than Black and brown communities.”
A 2018 study in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine found Black men are 14 times more likely than white men to die by firearm homicide.
Sean Reeves, with CT Against Gun Violence, lost his son 11 years ago when he was shot and killed in New Haven.
“We have had several mass shootings throughout the last few years, which has informed and pushed policy,” he said.
But Reeves said lawmakers need to do more to address everyday gun violence in communities.
“I don’t really think policy addresses those things yet,” he said.
Stein said all citizens need an equal chance at having an equal quality of life.
He said it’s important for the media to tell stories from Sandy Hook, but it’s also imperative that Americans pay attention to gun violence in cities.
“We don’t hear about these stories that are existing every day,” Stein said. “Sometimes the media forgets to report on that, and sometimes we take it for granted. It’s ‘Oh, yes; another Black man killed in Hartford. Oh, let me scroll the page.’
“We can’t stop caring about this,” he said.
