Hello, and welcome back to ACRAC. I'm Jed Wolfaw, and we've got a really timely and important

and great show for you today. I have with me, Dr. Katherine Hoops, who is an assistant professor

of anesthesiology, though she has trained in pediatrics and PICU. But here at Johns Hopkins,

the PICU belongs to the Department of anesthesiology, hence she is a assistant professor of anesthesiology

and not a pediatrics. But she is also core faculty at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions,

and she has a joint appointment in health policy and management at the Bloomberg School of

Public Health here at Johns Hopkins. She is a fantastic teacher and leader in this really important

area of gun violence prevention, and we are going to talk about that, and that's why we've got her

on the show. Katherine, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So we've heard a lot. I mean,

it's such a timely issue right now in a lot of ways, unfortunately, but certainly folks have heard

a lot on the news about increases in gun violence, both during the pandemic and of course with

mass shootings that have happened lately. What changes can you break down that suggests what's

going on here? Let's talk about some of the data and what we actually know. Yeah, sure. So first,

let me start by saying that all the data I'm going to be referencing is coming from CDC's

underlying cause of death database that's part of the wide ranging online data for epidemiologic

research or the wonder database. The underlying cause of death database contains data based on

death certificates for US residents. So gun violence has long been a public health crisis in the

United States, and it affects all of our health and well-being in some way. But in 2020, the most

recent year for which complete data is available, gun deaths reached the highest number ever recorded.

It was a surging epidemic within the COVID-19 pandemic, and over 45,000 people died from gun

injuries in 2020. That's an average of 124 people every day, and that's 15 more people per day than

in 2019. So that increase was largely driven by gun homicides, which rose dramatically across the

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