Weapons: Of the 143 guns possessed by the killers, more than three quarters were obtained legally. They included dozens of assault weapons and semi-automatic handguns with high-capacity magazines. (See charts below.) Just as a perpetrator used a .40-caliber Glock to slaughter students in Red Lake, Minnesota, in 2005, so too did the one in Aurora, along with an AR-15 assault rifle, when blasting away at his victims in a darkened movie theater. In Newtown, Connecticut, the attacker wielded a .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle as he massacred 20 school children and six adults.
About eight-in-ten U.S. murders in 2021 – 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81% – involved a firearm.
The overall increase in U.S. gun deaths since the beginning of the pandemic includes an especially stark rise in such fatalities among children and teens under the age of 18. Gun deaths among children and teens rose 50% in just two years, from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.
The rate of children dying to firearms in the US is 6.01 per 100,000