Gunshots rang out as St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones was discussing gun violence prevention. She didn’t flinch
“My son and I go to sleep to the lullaby of gunshots within the distance each evening,” Jones mentioned, responding to a query on whether or not she felt protected. “It is part of my life now and that should not be.”
Earlier than the information convention, Jones and Kansas Metropolis Mayor Quinton Lucas had been taking part in a roundtable on how gun violence is affecting their cities.
“We discovered a powerful affiliation between the Covid-19 pandemic time-frame and a rise in gun violence within the U.S. in comparison with the pre-pandemic interval,” wrote the authors from Penn State School of Drugs.
The researchers checked out every day police reviews which corresponded to gun-related accidents and deaths from February 1, 2019, to March 31, 2021. These reviews got here from all 50 states and from Washington, DC, and had been obtained by means of the Gun Violence Archive, an unbiased, not-for-profit group.
And Missouri was one of many 28 states the examine recognized as having a considerably larger threat of gun violence throughout the pandemic.
The mayors on Friday joined survivors of gun violence within the St. Louis neighborhood of Dutchtown, which implements neighborhood violence interruption applications, and toured the neighborhood to watch these efforts, the information launch mentioned.
“Advocates and survivors emphasised the necessity to tackle root causes of crime and deal with gun violence like the general public well being disaster it’s,” the assertion mentioned. “Their level was emphasised additional within the press convention afterwards, when neither mayor flinched as gunshots rang out within the distance.”
CNN’s Aya Elamroussi contributed to this report.
