Welcome to Schim this. The start of our show this week might sound like the start of our show last week.

So we wanted to take a step back and look at the state of gun violence in America and what's changed and what hasn't.

Then it's that time of year again.

Ready, shoot, heart it!

But watching other kids party during a global pandemic is making us feel like our parents.

You kids with your loud music and your dance, Fogelberg.

Later we'll hit the headlines from this week's news and call up a doctor friend to ask about a health condition a lot of women face.

But often takes a long time to get diagnosed.

We're here to make you smarter and the news less overwhelming. Let's Schim this.

Another week in the United States, another mass shooting. On Monday, a man killed 10 people at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

News that reached many of us as we were only beginning to mourn the eight people killed last week in a series of shootings around Atlanta.

Obviously, these events are uniquely tragic. But we wouldn't be giving you the context on why this week's news matters if we didn't point out a few broader patterns about guns and gun violence in the US.

First, frequent mass shootings are the norm in the United States.

By some definitions, the rate of mass shootings has slowed since the start of the pandemic. But while mass shootings declined, overall gun violence in the US reached a record high, claiming the lives of 19,379 people, according to one nonprofit that tracks gun violence in the US.

And that figure doesn't include gun-related suicides, which in an average year kill over 20,000 Americans too.

Second, these gun violence trends are especially concerning because Americans bought a record number of guns last year, including reportedly more than 8 million Americans who bought a gun for the first time.

Many gun owners say they only intend to use their gun for self-defense. But there's little evidence to prove that's how most guns are actually used.

A 2015 study involving data from the CDC and FBI found that assaults involving a gun occurred almost seven times as often in states with the most guns compared to those with the least.

Gender also plays a role here. Guns in America make intimate partner violence deadly.

Granted, this statistic is over a decade old, but women are roughly eight times more likely to be killed as the result of domestic violence when there's a gun in their home.

This third piece of context is that men are overwhelmingly more likely to carry out a mass shooting than women.

There are a number of possible explanations for this, but experts have observed that many men who carried out mass murders felt their masculinity had been diminished through things like rejection by women or by financial setbacks.

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