The aftermath of a deadly 2009 Cleveland shooting.Peggy Turbett/Cleveland Plain Dealer/AP
An early morning shooting left nine people injured in Cleveland, Ohio on Sunday.
Cleveland Police say they responded after gunfire near the block of West 6th Street and Johnson Court—a downtown intersection surrounded by clubs, bars, and a liquor store—at around 2:30 a.m. They arrived to find nine people injured, according to Cleveland 19 News. All nine people were transported to MetroHealth Medical Center; details of their condition have not been made public.
Police said that they believe “a suspect opened fired toward a group of people and then fled the scene.” The shooter has not been identified.
Sunday morning’s shooting was just the latest tragedy in America’s gun violence epidemic. In just the first seven months of 2023, more than 22,000 people have died and more than 19,000 have been injured as a result of firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit tracking shooting data.
The pace of shootings is likely to rise over summer, as hotter weather has been proven to bring about more violence, including violence aided by guns. According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, one simple reason is that more people—especially those without access to air conditioning—are out and about. Children are also likelier to be outdoors, with schools closed. More people in public spaces means more everyday altercations that, because of how accessible guns are in the US, turn deadly. “This results in more chances for violence to erupt,” the Giffords Law Center says.
In 2016, two European-based psychiatry researchers, who theorized that the changing seasons’ effect on “mood, hostility, anger, irritability, and anxiety” could be related, used three recent years of United States data to study the phenomenon. Their journal article, titled “Seasonal Influence on Mass Shootings,” found a “clear increase in the number of mass shootings as well as the numbers killed and injured during the summer.”
“The peak begins in May and finishes around September–October,” they wrote.
But their findings came with a caveat: They warned they could not replicate their findings outside the United States, which has by far the greatest number of large shooting incidents among any developed country.
“Reproducing our results in two different countries would have strengthened our hypothesis,” the psychiatrists said. “However, no reliable data exist on mass shootings besides in the United States.”
That may just be because there are too few to count.
