L.A.’s Example

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L.A., home of the original gangster paradise, accidentally provided us a great example of the interplay between gangs, policing, and homicide rates. Takeaways Increasing gang activity leads to lower homicide clearance rates. Lower homicide clearance rates, in turn, facilitate/encourage gang activity. This led people in L.A.’s Southeast Division (i.e., south central) to having a chance of being murdered at a rate of 1 in 2,200, almost 9X higher than the national average. A spontaneous chart appeared The chart above landed on our desk among the  never-ending flow of new data (we are busy little beavers here at the Gun Facts Project). What was interesting was that this was one of the more concise bits of data proffered by local law enforcement, measuring both their homicide rate and the percentage of homicides that were gang-related.

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Divining the Decline

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American violent crime in 2025 dropped to rates not seen since Eisenhower was president. But FBI data anomalies are persistent, so take the 2025 measurement with a shaker of salt until we have a full year of catch-up reporting by local agencies. Regardless, things are better. It behooves us to try to understand why. Take-aways Large cities saw significant declines in violence and gun violence while smaller ones did not. Within the large agencies, focusing on gangs and improving police agency staffing were the two most contributive causes. Our perpetual pesky note on data quality Criminology data has always had exceptions, but we are still weeding our way through the post-2021 FBI conversion from their old Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system to the newer National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Though vastly improved from the switchover year, there is still frequent underreporting and misreporting. In some cases this makes the 2025 … Continue reading →

“Safe Storage” Realities

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“Safe Storage” laws appear to have a measurable effect—but it’s small, focused in one area, may have been a side effect of something completely unrelated, and in the big picture is not a game changer. Take-aways Compared to states that never enacted safe storage laws, there is a measurable additional decline in teenage firearm suicides. But there were also drops in other forms of teenage suicide. Most of these instances, though, are covariant with a strong increase in prescribing psychotropic medications, particularly SSRIs, to teenagers during the same period, which may have reduced suicidal ideation. The goal for safe storage laws Safe storage laws were conceived to try to protect unsupervised young people from doing stupid things with guns. The two stupid things that young people did with guns were to accidentally shoot themselves or somebody else, or to commit suicide.

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Domestic Gun Violence Perspectives

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A police detective once joked with us that he was confused at a scene because he couldn’t tell whether there was domestic violence or if the couple were into BDSM. Cop jokes aside, domestic violence is serious. Gunplay is serious. But we find out that the rate of gunplay in domestic violence is both rare and compartmentalized. Takeaways Guns are used in less than 3% of all domestic violence incidents. That drops to 1.3% if we eliminate merely brandishing a firearm as an act of intimidation. The rate of firearms in domestic violence between same-sex couples is nearly four times higher than their percentage of the population would otherwise predict. Cause(less) concerns We don’t take domestic violence lightly. In 2023, the year for which our data was extracted, there were over 877,196 incidents of domestic violence. We say “over” because our data comes from the FBI’s NIBRS data collection system. … Continue reading →

Gangs, Guns and the Internet

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Did the internet help promote gang lifestyle and migrate it from the city to the suburbs and further into rural areas? The data says it likely did. Take-aways Two phases of the internet rollout contributed to rising gang-like activity in both rural areas and fringe metro cities. It also pushed gang behaviors into suburbs but not to the same degree. Whispers from the Feds and Detectives Over the years we’ve heard whispers from police detectives claiming that between YouTube and cell phones, street gang culture had migrated from the inner cities of major metros, all the way out to the suburbs and perhaps beyond. It certainly seemed that way in 2023, when in the small town of Dadeville, Alabama (population 3,034), there was a mass public shooting with gang-like elements at a Sweet Sixteen party. As in many street gang interactions, gunfire erupted between two groups of people, resulting in … Continue reading →

Two Phase Crime Control

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Getting tough on criminals works in terms of reducing violence. We saw two waves of such in the late 20th century, and their combined stories tell us many interesting things, including why some of the numbers look a little odd. Take-aways Two waves of tough-on-crime laws suppressed gun violence but in different ways. The first wave made reductions via the second wave look less effective than they otherwise would have appeared. Federal initiatives to get all states to enact certain tough-on-crime laws helped more crime-lenient states catch up to more restrictive states in terms of reducing violent crime. The issue and the reaction Violent crime in America started a steady and steep upward climb in the 1970s and 1980s and into the first few years of the 1990s. And Americans got damn sick of it all. In response to seemingly out-of-control crime, states and even the federal government began looking … Continue reading →

London Ain’t Chicago

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Gangs are violent. Hence, the degree of violence any area has is a function of how many people are in gangs and what their attitudes are toward violence. Take-aways Street gang participation rates in Chicago are at least 80 times that of London As in the United States, about half or more of gun homicides are gang-related in London Participation Rates and Culture We have noted in other places that street gang participation rates in the United States are astronomically high compared to any other location around the world. Since the United States gets compared to the United Kingdom too often in regard to guns and violence, looking at just those cases in isolation gives some perspective. The problem is that the United States is huge and culturally varied and thus a bit of a tough comparison. Comparing London, which has meaningful reporting on their gang participation rates, with a … Continue reading →

Cops and Gun Crime

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Police staffing has an effect on gun crimes (duh!). But how much? In short, the effect is robust, though other factors matter. Take-aways Low-end moderate correlation between sworn duty officer headcounts and lower gun homicide rates. Effect heavily skewed to major metro cities. The ratio of detectives to patrol officers had a lesser correlation but still a strong effect. Cops, Gangs and Guns In our groundbreaking Top 15 Murder Counties study, We noticed a statistically significant correlation between total police staffing and gun homicide rates. But that was a simple measure of the total staffing of an an aggregate of several police agencies and we know that there are other variables. In particular, cities that have low homicide clearance rates tend to have exaggerated homicide rates. This would indicate that the number of detectives might have an effect. And we also know from the Ferguson effect studies that the number … Continue reading →

Medical Care and Gun Deaths

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A common meme claims advances in medical treatments drove gun death rates down. Like many memes, it fails testing. Take-aways Four major initiatives in emergency treatment have no consistent correlation with gun-homicide/gun-assault ratios The Claim and Its Problems With anything political, bad claims can range from irrelevant to irrational. In other cases, it comes from substandard research blindly echoed by activists. The latter is what we see at the intersection of gun play and medical treatment.

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Gun Injury Deep Dive

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Gun homicides are a problem, but so are non-fatal gun injuries from assaults. Yet diving into that data shows the causes are likely the same. Take-aways Non-fatal gunshot wounds tend to skew to the same demographics as gun homicides. The data is likely an undercount due to the same factors. The Problem A lot of people get shot and don’t die. Estimates vary a bit, but between sources like Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS) data and CDC “Fast Facts,” there are between 73,000 and 85,000 hospital emergency department visits for non-fatal gunshot injuries. On the high end, the Centers for Disease Control’s WISQARS website says there were 142,143 violence related non-fatal firearm injuries. But that’s just people who sought hospital medical attention. It does not include visits to urgent care, under-the-radar care (doctors with revoked licenses, veterinarians working on people, off-duty nurses, etc.). Let’s toss the outliers and just say … Continue reading →