By Staff, Agencies 

Portland, like many large cities in the United States, is grappling with increasing gun violence. Last year saw a record high number of shootings and 90 homicides in Portland. The previous record was 66 homicides. And there were more shootings in January 2022 than in January 2021, according to police data.

Portland Police and city officials say the violence has taken its toll on the Black community the most. They blamed controversies involving gangs, drug deals and disputes among homeless people. The situation is exacerbated by the pandemic, economic hardship and mental health crisis.

“We are experiencing a public safety crisis and it is affecting everyone,” City Councilor Mingus Mapps said in a statement.

The most recent incident is a shooting Saturday night in Portland’s Rose City Park neighborhood that caused the death of a woman and the injury of five other people.

Portland police responded about 8 p.m. to a reported shooting near Northeast 55^th Avenue and Hassalo Street, which is roughly the southwest corner of Normandale Park. Officers found the woman dead.

Five other wounded people – three women and two men – were taken to hospitals. Neither their conditions nor the circumstances of the shooting were immediately clear.

The shooting came as demonstrators gathered at Normandale Park for a march seeking justice for Amir Locke, Patrick Kimmons “and all others,” according to a graphic promoting the demonstration on social media.

The 43-year-old Portland man, Benjamin Smith, was charged with murder on Tuesday.

Smith was charged with one count of murder in the second degree with a firearm, four counts of attempted murder in the first degree with a firearm, two counts of assault in the first degree with a firearm, and two counts of assault in the second degree with a firearm.

Police Chief Chuck Lovell in Portland said at a news conference on Tuesday that the shooting arose from a confrontation between “an armed resident of the area and armed protesters,” but the police and other law enforcement officials declined to provide details about what unfolded Saturday night or say who shot Smith.

The police identified the woman who was killed as Brandy Knightly, 60, who was shot in the head at close range and died on the scene, according to the affidavit.

Relatedly, a report by surgeons in New York state suggests that more than 1.4 million years of potential life are lost annually to gun crime and violence.

Traumatic injuries are thought to be the leading cause of death among Americans ages 46 and younger, and motor vehicle fatalities have long been considered the top culprit. But over the past decade, there has been a noticeable increase in firearm deaths, which made the researchers behind this new study wonder if that distinction was still true. To find out, they sifted through the latest available mortality data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 through 2018.

For most of this time period, yearly car deaths continued to outnumber firearm deaths. But by 2018, guns were on top. That year, nearly 39,000 Americans were killed by guns, while around 37,000 died in a motor vehicle crash.

The researchers also attempted to calculate the years of potential life lost, which subtracts the age when someone dies from their expected mortality, in this case age 80. In 2017, the team calculated that 1.44 million years of life were lost to firearms, compared with 1.37 million years lost to cars, and the gap grew even larger the next year. The team’s findings were published Tuesday in Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open.

“Although deaths from [motor vehicle crashes] used to be the single largest cause of traumatic death” in the US, the researchers wrote, “firearms have now surpassed it.”

As other data has shown, the lion’s share of these gun deaths involved men [85% in 2018]. But there were distinct patterns seen across different groups. About half of all gun deaths in 2018 were related to suicide and tended to involve older white men, for instance, and about 18% of deaths were related to homicides, which accounted for the bulk of deaths among Black men, who often died younger as well. Both gun-related suicides and homicides rose during the 10-year period, while deaths officially attributed to police shootings increased from 333 in 2009 to 539 in 2018. Official numbers aren’t necessarily accurate, however, and reporting by the Washington Post found that US police shot and killed 1,021 people in 2020 and 1,055 people in 2021.

It’s likely that trends for both car crashes and firearm deaths haven’t improved in the last few years. Since the pandemic began, there has been an increase of risky driving, while reported shootings have gone up in major cities as well. That said, suicides in general seem to have actually lowered during the first year of the pandemic, and gun violence may have declined in 2021.

The findings, the authors say, indicate that more has to be done to reduce the harms caused by guns – an admittedly difficult task in a country with more firearms than people and an aggressive political lobbying front dead set against any form of reform.

“Deaths related to firearms are potentially preventable causes of death and prevention efforts should be redirected,” the authors wrote.