New York, Nov 1 Jaden Thakur will never forget the day his uncle nearly became another victim in America's gun violence crisis.
The college student, who grew up in New Jersey, recounted the nightmarish scene: One day, while strolling down the street, Thakur's uncle accidentally bumped into someone, sparking a heated altercation between the two.
"At first, it was verbal, and then the guy kind of showed his gun and made my uncle back down," he said. At that critical moment, a passerby intervened, drawing his own gun to defend Thakur's uncle, ultimately preventing the situation from spiralling out of control.
"It was just crazy," said Thakur, his voice still laced with disbelief. "It's far too easy to acquire weapons in the US than in other places."
In Thakur's view, gun violence is "probably the biggest safety issue" confronting the United States. Official statistics underscore this grim reality: in 2023 alone, the Gun Violence Archive recorded 18,854 fatalities from gun violence, excluding suicides. Mass shootings, defined as incidents with four or more casualties, have doubled over the past decade, peaking in 2021 at 689.
Schools are becoming increasingly unsafe due to the prevalence of guns.
Today, American civilians own more than 400 million guns, exceeding the country's population. Deep partisan divisions and influential lobbying groups, such as the National Rifle Association, have routinely stalled gun control laws in Congress.
However, gun violence reflects only one aspect of the rising crime rates in the United States in recent years. In 2020, the United States saw a nearly 30 per cent increase in homicides, marking the largest annual rise on record, according to data released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In 2022, murder rates remained well above pre-pandemic levels, and property crimes, such as burglary, rose to a staggering 1,954.4 incidents per 100,000 people.
A growing sense of public insecurity has made violent crime one of Americans' top policy concerns in this election year. A Pew Research Center report in February revealed that 68 per cent of Republicans and nearly half of Democrats deemed crime reduction as a policy priority.
Even political violence is on the rise, with presidential candidates becoming targets. Since July, the Republican candidate Donald Trump has escaped three assassination attempts, while the suspect accused of shooting at Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign office in Arizona was found to possess over 120 guns and over 250,000 rounds of ammunition in his home and was preparing for a "mass casualty" act, according to US media reports.
Both candidates have been framing the crime issues in their favour ahead of the election. Harris said in September that violent crime has declined to a "near 50-year low," citing FBI data on crimes reported by police departments, while Trump claimed that violent crime has "skyrocketed" during the Biden-Harris administration, citing a Justice Department survey.
Such a crime landscape underscores deeper ills of the US society, such as systemic racism, economic inequality, and political marginalisation, all of which are often prolonged and ignored by politicians.
According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, the number of shootings doubled in the neighbourhood of East New York and nearly tripled in Brownsville in 2020, both hot spots of violence for more than a quarter-century.
The centre noted that these increases reveal a more troubling pattern, which sociologist Patrick Sharkey described as the "rigid geography of violence." In this pattern, crime remains relatively concentrated in specific areas even as overall levels decline.
A Brookings Institution study links high rates of violent crime and police shootings to socioeconomic inequities, particularly in marginalised communities. Structural racism has fostered conditions where Black populations disproportionately reside in under-resourced areas, with limited access to quality education, healthcare, and economic opportunities. This concentration of disadvantage thus feeds cycles of violence.
With election day approaching, Thakur said he remains undecided over which candidate can make America safe as neither appears capable of solving gun-related issues. "Overall, I don't think anyone is going to change anything."
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