NEW YORK – Today, Everytown for Gun Safety and its grassroots networks, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, released the following statements after gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson reported net sales of over $1.1 billion in 2020, double that of the prior year. A recent Everytown Support Fund report showed that the COVID-19 pandemic intensified the country’s gun violence crisis, with gun homicides and non-suicide-related shootings taking 19,300 lives in 2020, a 25% increase from 2019. The Everytown analysis also shows that gun deaths in 2020 were at the highest rate in the last two decades.
“The result of lax gun safety laws has been not only death and destruction, but also record gun industry profits,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “As gun violence continues to devastate our communities, we must put people over profit and pass bi-partisan, common-sense gun safety measures.”
“If more guns made us safer, we’d be the safest country in the world — but instead the gun homicide rate in the United States is 25 times higher than other developed nations,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action. “In the past year we’ve seen the colliding crises of COVID and gun violence, and as we now emerge from the pandemic we must act to end the gun violence epidemic. The cost of inaction is too high.”
Every day, more than 100 Americans are shot and killed and over 200 more are wounded. More statistics about gun violence in the United States are available here.
