A country founded on violence and why America’s oldest wound keeps bleeding

This summer, the United States of America will mark 250 years of its existence with fireworks and ceremonies, speeches about liberty and progress, and celebrations of how far this country has come.

And in homes, neighborhoods, and cities across the country, as those celebrations unfold, violence, particularly incidents involving firearms, will be a grim and harsh reality people will be faced with. This is not a coincidence. It is a continuum.

At least 121 mass shootings have already happened in the United States in 2026—and the country hasn’t yet reached the official anniversary of its founding. At 250 years old, America is not growing out of its violence. It is deepening into it.

So far, this year, 130 people have been killed and more than 460 injured, according to Gun Violence Data Hub and Gun Violence Archive statistics analyzed by data visualization Journalist Susie Webb. 

Those incidents include the shooting in Shreveport, La., on April 19, that left eight children dead and two adults injured; the shooting at the Mall of Louisiana on April 23, in Baton Rouge, leaving five injured and one dead; and another that same week in Winston-Salem, N.C., where five teens were injured and two killed. 

Even schools and places of worship are not immune to shootings and violence. Five people, including three University of Iowa students, were shot in Iowa City’s pedestrian mall near the university campus on April 19. Police say the suspected shooter was a 17-year-old male. 

“The number of annual mass shootings had been on a decline since it spiked in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 20% fewer mass shootings in 2025 compared to the year before.

The same cannot be said for 2026 so far. Already, there have been 45% more mass shootings compared to the same time last year,” reported Ms. Webb.

A mass shooting is generally defined as an incident of violence involving firearms where multiple (three, four or more) people are shot, injured, or killed, typically excluding the perpetrator. 

The victims and perpetrators include various creeds, classes and socio-economic backgrounds.

Mass violence in America began at its founding—in the forced removal of Indigenous peoples, a history wrought with the murderous genocide of the Native American peoples who are the original owners of the land.

It was soon followed by the forced enslavement of Black people kidnapped from Africa under the whip and the rope—and its violence has never stopped. The question is no longer how this keeps happening. The question is why the country refuses to look at where it started.

The violence starts at the top, stated the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, during remarks about the cause and effects of violence, at an anti-violence rally at the Illinois State Building in downtown Chicago in 2008. His message was titled, “The Cause and Effect of a Violent Society.”

“We say we want sensible gun laws, but we are demanding it from government at the same time that our government has the highest military budget of any nation in the world;

Developing more and more weapons to kill more and more people! How can the violence stop on the bottom, when the violence is perpetrated by policies at the top?” Minister Farrakhan said.

Minister Farrakhan’s remarks centered on the origin of violence in the society. “There is a saying that reads like this: ‘Children do what is natural until they learn what is normal.’

Any child that you see, whether it is Black, White, Asian, Hispanic or Native American; whether it is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist, the child does what is natural, like learning to crawl, pull up on things that will help it to become erect and to walk—we didn’t teach it those things.

But then, the child learns to become normal. Normal means that you learn the norms, which are the folkways and the mores of the society or the culture in which you live. But then if we keep watching, we go further and further away from the natural;

But yet, we are still considered normal. Everybody is looking for somebody to straighten out a mess that was made, unfortunately, by those in authority.

We cannot stem the violence that is here at the bottom, which is an effect, unless we look at the violence that begins at the top, which is the cause. We are the effect of a cause that we did not stem the tide of, and now it’s manifesting in the children.”

Historical and modern context

This country was founded in violence by the government which has trickled down to everyday life.

In 1921 an example of government or state violence was the Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Riots where a prosperous Black neighborhood was bombed and burned to the ground by a White Mob, killing as many as 300 people.

Nearly eight decades later, in 1999, two students opened fire at Columbine High School, killing 13 students and one teacher. In 2015, a White gunman killed nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., during Bible study.

In 2017, a shooter killed 60 at a Las Vegas festival. In 2018, 11 Jewish worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, 23 people were killed at an El Paso Walmart in an attack targeting Latinos.

In 2021, six Asian women were among eight killed at Atlanta-area spas. In 2022, a White supremacist killed 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store.

Such cases are still unfolding. All impact communities, and they exemplify the country’s pattern of violence. Notwithstanding the shifting targets, the geography is always America, and the body count rises.

Researchers say the public conversation about mass violence has long centered on the most visible tragedies, but the data tells a different story about where the violence lies.

According to a 2025 UCLA Fielding School of Public Health study, half of all mass shooting fatalities between 2014 and 2023 occurred in homes—not schools, workplaces, or houses of worship.

Among children under nine, that figure rises to 89 percent, compared to 62 percent among older children and teens and 44 percent among adults.

Women were more likely to be killed in mass shootings at home (50%) than men (40%). The household—the place America imagines as sanctuary—is where the crisis is most concentrated, and most hidden.

Going to the root

Dr. Monique S. Muhammad, incoming National President of the Association of Black Psychologists, names what data alone cannot reach. Based in Newark, N.J., she calls the mechanism of transformation denaturing—the systematic severing of an African people from their language, their God, their land, their understanding of themselves.

“We’ve become very violent. But that wasn’t our history. That wasn’t who we are or how we were prior to encountering Europeans,” she said.

“Whenever something is taken out of its nature, it loses the power it had in its original form, and Black people have been denatured psychologically, physically, and spiritually, then conditioned to hate themselves.

That death is not always physical,” she continued.  “It looks like the man with the beautiful house and the nice car, who is empty inside, or the woman who has lost everything about herself to be accepted by a society that does not see her and does not want to.

“We are fractured. We are broken because of that, so I’m not letting anyone off the hook. That could cut across the board. There’s so many of us who are operating at a low level of existence. And that’s spiritually. That’s not just tangible items,” argued Dr. Muhammad.

A starting point for solutions is to zoom out and recognize the hopelessness, helplessness, and internalized worthlessness people carry every day. “I’m not trying to say this is a ‘Black’ thing, because again, we’ve learned it from somewhere. It’s not who we are organically. … We’re seeing a manifestation of what we’ve been living,” she said.

“The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, and the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan bears Him witness, that whenever you are examining a problem or some troubling phenomenon, you have to always go to the root of things,”

Said Student Minister Demetric Muhammad of Mosque No. 55 in Memphis and the Whitehaven Study Group. He is also a member of the Nation of Islam Research Group and an author.

The violence visiting Black people in America stretches back to the slave ship, to the auction block, to the plantation—a centuries-long infrastructure of sanctioned brutality the U.S. has never fully dismantled or acknowledged, he noted.

Since the Nation of Islam’s founding by Allah (God) in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad, The Great Mahdi, there has been present in America a knowledge and wisdom that, if adhered to, could save it, explained Student Min. Demetric Muhammad.

The divine knowledge delivered from Master Fard Muhammad, taught by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and carried forward by the Honorable Minister Farrakhan, represents nothing less than a God-given prescription for healing that is good and beneficial for all of humanity, he said.

The evidence is that those who follow the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad under the leadership and example of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan to not engage in violent acts.

Members of the Nation of Islam are forbidden from carrying weapons—not so much as a penknife—a discipline rooted in the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. In America, a nation drowning in gun violence, that record stands as testimony.

In the 1990s “Dopebusters” campaign, the Fruit of Islam (F.O.I., the men of the Nation of Islam) brought peace to the Kenilworth Parkside and Mayfair Mansions housing complexes in Washington, D.C., closing open-air drug markets.

They entered communities that others would not—removing drug trafficking, crime and violence not through condemnation or brandishing weapons, but through dignified engagement—achieving marked behavior modification without robbing those they served of their self-respect. 

Restoration, argued Student Min. Demetric Muhammad, is being withheld through the censorship of Minister Farrakhan, denied a Facebook account, an Instagram account, and a YouTube channel, with followers’ postings of his lectures regularly removed.

It is not merely the silencing of one man, but a two-pronged assault: blocking a proven, behavior-modifying message while aggressively promoting a culture soaked in violence.

Children are becoming desensitized to the taking of life, said Student Min. Demetric Muhammad. “Imagine what America would look like if the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s ministry were allowed to proliferate the airwaves?

I believe that violent crime would plummet … the hiding of the light, the censorship of God’s Messenger, lies at the root of America’s fall, which is being marked by escalating levels of violent crime. To me, the solution rests within allowing the Minister the freedom to teach the American people,” he stated.

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