The number of local children injured in shootings in 2021 is on track to break records, and it’s causing fears among medical professionals at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth.

Through May of this year, the hospital has treated 35 children for gunshot wounds, in many cases accidental, according to a news release. Accidental or not, gunshot wounds are among the most likely injuries from which children can die.

Two of the 35 children admitted to Cook Children’s died from their wounds, according to the release. In the entirety of 2019, 41 children were admitted for gunshot wounds and five died. In 2020, that number rose to 47 shot and four who died.

Dr. Dan Guzman, an emergency room doctor at Cook Children’s, said in the release he fears that number will continue to rise sharply throughout the summer months. With children out of school and oftentimes at home alone while their parents work, an improperly secured gun can cost a life.

Dallas has seen a string of road rage assaults. From Friday night to Monday morning, police responded to three shootings related to road rage. On Friday, a driver shot a pregnant woman in the head, Fox 4 News reported, after the driver cut her and her boyfriend off in southeast Dallas. The woman’s baby was delivered safely, but she remained in critical condition. On Sunday, police say a driver opened fire along a road in Dallas and hit two cars. One person was shot in the hand.

14 — the number of school shootings since March, when many districts returned to in-person classes. That’s the most in that period since at least 1999, though the three killed and eight injured was fewer than the 33 people who died in the same timeframe in 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/24/school-shootings-2021-increase/

By almost every measure, 2021 has already been a terrible year for gun violence. And many fear it will get worse. Last weekend alone, more than 120 people died in shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, with three especially dangerous incidents in Austin; Chicago; and Savannah, Ga., killing two and injuring at least 30.

Through the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States, about 54 lives lost per day, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization. That’s 14 more deaths per day than the average toll during the same period of the previous six years.

Researchers note a number of factors they say are driving the upswing, including the unprecedented surge in gun sales. In 2020, a year of pandemic, protests and elections, people purchased more than 23 million guns, a 66 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.

Controlling for population, the analysis found that the higher the jump in gun sales between 2019 and 2020, the higher the jump in gun violence that resulted in at least one death.

In the 1920s
The National Revolver Association, which was part of the NRA, proposed requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Other aspects of the NRA’s legislation: adding five years prison time if a gun was used in a crime, prohibiting the sale of a gun to a non-citizen, imposing a one-day waiting period before a purchaser could take possession of a gun, and opening records of gun sales to police. Nine states adopted the legislation.