20 Percent of Americans Have Lost a Family Member to Gun Violence: Poll

Gun violence is rampant in the United States, and a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation sheds light on the toll the nation’s addiction to firearms is taking on American families.

The poll found that a majority of adults have personally experienced or have a family member who has experienced a gun-related incident — meaning they have either been threatened with a gun, witnessed someone being injured by a gun, been injured by a gun, or been killed by a gun.

One in five American adults has a family member who has been killed by a gun, including death by suicide.

The poll also found that gun violence disproportionately affects people of color, with twice as many Black Americans (34 percent) saying they have a family member who has died from gun violence, than white Americans (17 percent.). Sixty-two percent of both Black and Hispanic adults say gun-related activity is a major concern or constant threat, compared to 45 percent for white Americans.

Over half of all adults say gun violence is a “constant threat” in their local community, with 84 percent saying they have taken at least one precaution to protect themselves or their families from gun violence.

There have been 146 mass shootings in the United States this year, as of Tuesday morning, resulting in over 200 deaths, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The poll comes a day after a shooter killed five people in a Louisville, Kentucky, bank and two weeks after a shooter killed six people, including three children, at a school in Nashville. The massacres have reignited the debate around gun reform, with President Biden calling for Congress to pass gun control measures and Republicans refusing to consider making it more difficult for Americans to acquire high-powered assault rifles designed specifically to kill people en masse.

“We’re not going to fix it,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a staunch defender of gun rights, said on the day of the shooting in Nashville in a rare moment of candor about the GOP’s plan, or lack thereof, to address the routine slaughter of children in America.

Republicans have been similarly clueless following the shooting in Louisville on Monday. “The shooter no signs up until the morning that he was capable of doing anything like this,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told Fox News on Tuesday. Comer added that killing five people in a bank was “unnecessary.”