July 4 — Independence Day — is the worst day of the the year for mass shootings in the US, an academic has found.
In the wake of the Baltimore block party shooting that left two dead and 28 injured — 15 of those children — a criminologist said annual celebrations of the declaration of independence from Britain in 1776 were frequently marred by gun violence.
James Alan Fox from the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, found in data from the Gun Violence Archive that there had been 52 mass shootings on July 4 over the previous 10 years, more than any other day of the year. The second-worse day of the year on average was July 5, with 44 gun massacres over the past decade.
Ironically, he blamed lax restrictions on carrying firearms — as enshrined in the US Bill of Rights, adopted by the US republic in the years following the War of Independence — coupled with drinking at patriotic parties for the annual explosions of violence.
"The fact that you have states that allow concealed carry without a permit, without any training, is problematic," Fox said.
"When you have block parties, for example, people are going there with guns in their pockets, and then they can get into an argument over even trivial things, which can lead to gunfire, and it’s a large gathering like a block party or a party at an Airbnb, lots of people get shot in the crossfire," he added. "They may not be involved in that argument, that dispute, but the bullet doesn’t know that."
Another academic, Daniel Webster from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said the neighborhood around Sunday's shooting in the majority-black city near Washington DC was a dangerous mix of poverty and gun culture.
The Brooklyn Homes public housing project is "a community very under-resourced, a lot of folks struggling and guns are readily available," Webster said. "So you put that brew together with the well-into-the-night gatherings, you’ve got the potential, anyway, for a mass shooting."
"It’s usually useful to think about gun violence as a phenomenon of grievances and altercations," he added. "And these things can lead to multiple people shot rather than one, simply because July 4 brings people together."
But Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, said soaring summer temperatures were to blame for overheated disputes igniting into gunfire.
“We know that homicide tends to spike in summer months to begin with, and they’re usually highest around July and August,” Schildkraut stressed. “There’s a lot of people who are gathered in large groups in typically open spaces, which we know tend to be characteristic of mass shootings, as well."
"We also know, of course, when you add in things like alcohol and other potential influences all together, it kind of creates a perfect storm where things are going to go bad pretty quickly,” she added.