A US gun violence monitor says there were over 5,000 more fatal shootings during US President Joe Biden's first year in office than under former US President Donald Trump in 2017.
The sharp rise has prompted school student gun control group March For Our Lives (M4OL) to demand Biden stop the bloodshed.
Figures from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) show the total number of murders, justifiable self-defence homicides and accidental deaths involving firearms was 20,783 in 2021, compared to 15,727 in 2017 when Trump took office — a difference of 32 percent.
Shockingly, the number of mass shootings was up from 348 in 2017, to 693 in 2021, while the number of children killed or injured rose from 724 to 1,060.
There were 24,090 recorded suicides in the US using a firearm in 2021. Nationwide suicide figures are not available prior to 2019, but the site has used an estimate of 22,000 for previous years.
As of January 21, 2,627 people had been shot dead in the US, of whom 1,518 were suicides and 1,109 were intentional homicides or accidents, according to the GVA, including 26 mass shootings and one mass murder. Based on the trend, the US could potentially see over 19,000 killings and 450 mass shootings by the end of the year.
2020 saw several Democrat-controlled city councils across the US vote to cut police budgets, a move largely in response to the "Defund the Police" demand brought on by the wave of Black Lives Matter protests following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Crime rates have reportedly since soared in some of those cities.
A statement from M4OL, founded by survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, notes that Biden has only "tinkered" with gun control measures during his first year in the White House.
"As a candidate, the president pledged to end the epidemic of gun violence, but as our leader in the White House, he has simply tinkered at the edges, rather than coordinating a whole-of-government response that treats this crisis like the emergency that it is," the group said in a statement.
"On the president's anniversary, at the conclusion of one of the most deadly years for gun violence in our nation's history, we must ask the president bluntly: Mr. President, have you done enough?" the young survivors ask.
Armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic military assault rifle, former student Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and injured the same number on a Valentine's Day rampage at the Parkland school in 2018.
The event sparked more widespread calls for restrictions on gun purchasing and ownership, with Trump calling on state legislatures to take action — where the federal Congress has failed to do so for decades.
The latest figures compiled by the Washington Post more recently determined that there were at least 42 acts of gun violence in K-12 educational institutions during school hours in 2021 to date, a statistic the agency noted was the most during any year since 1999.