One in five Americans has had family member killed by gun violence - study

One in five Americans has lost a family member to gun violence, an alarming survey published on Tuesday claims.

The research came out one day after five people were killed by a gunman at a Louisville bank, at least the 15th mass shooting of the month, and 146th this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The resource website defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded.

The new study reflects the increasing commonality of gun-related incidents across the US. The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 19% of Americans said they had a family member killed by a gun, including by suicide, and one in six said they had witnessed a shooting.

Among respondents who are Black, the already shocking figure in both categories jumped to one in three.

The fear of gun violence is also prevalent, the study found. In particular, an epidemic of school shootings, from Columbine high school in 1999 to last month's murder of six - including three nine-year-old students - at the Covenant school in Nashville, appears to have left parents more concerned than others.

Asked if they were worried "daily or almost daily" about a family member falling victim to gun violence, 24% of parents with children under 18 said they were, compared with 15% for the adult population at large.

"Unfortunately when we allow guns everywhere, for anyone with no questions asked, nowhere is safe from this gun violence epidemic," said the founder of the gun safety advocacy group Moms Demand Action, Shannon Watts, in response to the Nashville school shooting.

"We cannot and will not accept this reality. Our lawmakers must take action to keep us safe."

The survey was conducted in the week before the 27 March shooting in Nashville and delved deeper into Americans' experiences with guns as well as gun crime.

More than one in five, 21%, said they had personally been threatened with a gun, and 17% said they had witnessed somebody being shot. Those who said they had been injured by a gunshot, or had fired a weapon in self-defense, totaled 4% in each category.

The results also revealed, unsurprisingly, that gun violence affects racial minorities at a far higher rate.

Black adults (34%) are about twice as likely as white (17%) or Hispanic (18%) adults to say that they have a family member who was killed by a gun. They are also more than twice as likely - 31% to 14% - as white adults to say they witnessed someone being shot, with Hispanic adults in between at 22%.

Overall, the survey found a majority of US adults, 54%, have either personally been affected or had a family member affected by a gun-related incident, such as witnessing a shooting, being threatened by gun, or being injured or killed by a gun.

Amid the recent rise in mass shootings in the US, almost all of which were committed using AR-15 style rifles, Joe Biden has repeated his call for Congress to pass an assault weapons ban, which was not included in a bipartisan gun reform package that the president signed into law last year.

But Democrats, despite controlling the Senate, have been unable to make headway and in the last Congress lacked the two-thirds majority needed to approve the assault weapons ban approved by the House of Representatives.

The Connecticut US senator Chris Murphy, who was elected after a gunman murdered 26 people - including 20 children - at his state's Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, has been among the most vocal Democrats criticizing the opposition party's unwillingness to pass more substantial gun control.

"It is beyond me why Republicans who claim to care about the health of our kids don't seem to give a crap about our children who are being exposed to these epidemic, cataclysmic rates of gun violence," Murphy said in an interview with Salon.

"I don't really think people understand how big a problem this is and how quickly it has come to overwhelm us."