One in five Americans has lost a loved one to gun violence

The murder in Louisville on Monday in which five people were shot dead by a fired banker is close to everyday life in the United States.

According to a new study, one in five Americans has lost a family member to gun violence and the same number have at some point been threatened with a gun.

Concerns and fears about gun violence are on the rise in the United States, where acts of insanity like school shootings occur every week and virtually anyone can carry a gun under their jacket.

According to a new study by The Kaiser Family Foundation, 20 percent of all Americans have lost a family member to a gun-related incident, including suicide, and an equal number have been threatened by a gun. One in six people has witnessed an injury from a shooting, according to the foundation.

The study is published the day after the murders in Louisville, where a fired banker took a gun to his old workplace and shot five people dead.

Record numbers

So far this year alone, the United States has had at least 146 reported and verified mass shootings with a total of more than 200 dead and hundreds injured, according to figures from the Gun Violence Archive.

The number of mass shootings in the United States has increased dramatically in recent years, and it is feared that the number of gun deaths this year will exceed the numbers from 2021, when nearly 49,000 people died in gun-related violence, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of suicides has also increased and figures show that half of all gun-related deaths are suicides.

Main cause of death

A quarter of parents of children under 18 say they worry daily about gun violence, perhaps because guns are now the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in the United States.

But a solution to the problems is not within reach and the view on the constitutionally protected right to bear arms is polarized.

Four out of ten adults state that they have a weapon in the home. Of these, more than half store their weapon together with the ammunition and almost as many do not have it in a locked gun safe. Over 30 percent of parents of children under 18 who own guns report that they keep their guns loaded.