Author Archives: Guy Smith

Scoping Gang Violence

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To say that gangs are the principal source of gun violence in America is akin to saying a Russian invasion is a little noisy. We at Gun Facts have repeatedly noted that gangs cause most of the bloodshed. A new (to us) academic work helps to illustrate this and to compare with some of our estimates as well. It’s worse than we thought in some respects. Take-aways Gun homicides are primarily street gang related. This violence is highly concentrated in a handful of metro areas. Focusing on core gang members reduces street gang gun homicides. Gang related… multiple definitions We first must discuss yet another problem with criminology data consistency. There is no single and uniformly applied definition of “gang related” for crime circumstances. Each locality applies their own… if they even bother with writing down a formal definition. Hence, any national data you have seen concerning gang-related violence is … Continue reading →

Mass Shooting Metrics

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It is time to look at the other types of “mass shootings,” given that what the public perceives they are, and what they are really, are quite different. They also inform us that street gang violence has many manifestations. Take-aways Alternate definitions of “mass shooting” obfuscate street gang causation. Highest victim and perpetrator rates are for Blacks in active gang ages. Higher urbanicity is correlated with higher mass shooting victims when deaths and injuries are both included. Definitions Amtrak once drastically improved their horrible on-time record by changing the definition of “on time.” Something similar has happened with “mass shootings.” In the 1990s, criminologists defined “mass PUBLIC shootings” (note the added word … it is important). Given their well-crafted definition, decades of research was committed to understanding mass public shootings. And this is the public’s general perception of such events. They think of Sandy Hook, Pulse Night Club, King Soopers … Continue reading →

Gun Violence Audit – 2025

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You have to be a little crazy to take gun violence analysis to the extremes we do. This article, an audit of many things we can derive from the FBI’s database of 13,916,425 crime victims in 2023, is just the latest example of our data derangement. Take-aways 87% of gun crimes result in no or only minor injuries. Deaths occur in 10% and serious injuries in 3%. Only 40% of gun crime offenders are arrested in the same year. Arrest rates fall sharply in high-population counties. Wholesale Data We have a project at Gun Facts that we jokingly named “Data Whore” while conceptualizing it. Unfortunately, the name stuck, and it appears in too many places within our internal systems to change now. The goal was to establish a database system (PostgreSQL, for the geeks out there) to load in long-term data and thus be able to correctly extract details at … Continue reading →

Violence Project Policy Problem

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When a friend makes a mistake, you kindly nudge them back into a more rational mode. That is what I am doing now for the Violence Project. The Violence Project, Before and Now Gun Facts has been both a fan and a friend to the Violence Project. In their beginning, they were like us: data butlers who did not make policy recommendations. Their resources (much more than the Gun Facts project has or will ever likely receive) allowed them to gather an incredible amount of detailed information about mass public shooting (MPS) events and perpetrators. We also have helped the Violence Project. During a periodic update of the Gun Facts Mass Public Shooting database, we identified three such events in our database that were missing in theirs. So, we sent emails with pertinent details, and they responded with kindness and gratitude. But in recent times, we have noticed that they … Continue reading →

Gun Homicides by Household

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How many household guns are used in homicides? Nearly none. Takeaways Aside from career crimes and gang related activities, 0.004% of households with guns are involved in gun homicides. What Started This Analysis A podcast interviewer sent me a set of questions with which to prep, and he asked about private gun ownership and crime in a way I had not seen phrased before. Given some advances in data and insights into gun homicides, I felt the open question needed to be addressed. The core question was: “Outside of intentional or spontaneous criminal activities (gangs, robberies, burglaries, aggravated assaults, etc.) what percentage of private gun owners committed a gun homicide?”

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Direct Exposure to Nonsense

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There is weak research, improper research, and misleading research. Then there is stupid research, which often incorporates all of the above. We recently encountered what can charitably be described as stupid gun research of a variety where common sense appears to be a foreign concept to the authors. JAMA That In Your Pipe And Smoke It Yet again the Journal of the American Medical Association committed criminology malpractice. In this case, the corpse of intellectual reason was slayed by a paper titled Direct Exposure to Mass Shootings Among US Adults. We would normally just put a new entry on our Bad Research Roster page, which you should reference any time someone lobs a “study” at you. But this piece of work (or piece of something) was so deeply defective and comical, it calls for a blog entry to not only inform you, but teach how to detect industrial-grade buncombe. The … Continue reading →

Pondering Permits

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Though it is difficult to ignore the possible unconstitutionality of requiring a permit to exercise an enumerated right, some states require residents to obtain a permit before they can purchase a handgun (or any gun). But do these permits make any difference? Some activist groups say so. Some academic studies say either yes or no. That a minimum of 43% of crime guns come from underground markets would indicate any effect would be marginal. After that… it gets complicated. Takeaways Permit-to-purchase laws have no material effect on gun homicide or suicide rates. The 1993-era anti-crime legislative movement limits pure test cases. A Dearth of Data Permit-to-purchase (PTP) laws have been touted as preventatives for homicides, suicides and gunshot injuries. We can measure the first two, not the last.

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Underreporting Gun Crime

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“The crime rate isn’t going down,” moaned a Twitter user. “The big cities are purposefully not reporting crime.” Neither of the above is accurate, but there is a crime reporting problem, in that some people may be misinterpreting data … for political gain. Take-aways There is significant, general nonreporting into the FBI’s new NIBRS system. Some well-documented hot counties with large populations are not reporting, which masks their gun crime and street gang data, including gun homicide rates. The systems that the Federal government has in place to encourage reporting into NIBRS are ineffective. NIBRS Mayhem For decades, the FBI orchestrated the Uniform Crime Reporting system (UCR). This was a nationwide program whereby all law enforcement agencies – city, county, state, campus, et cetera – were to report what crime incidents they processed. These were largely monthly counts of major categories of crime (robbery, murder, being a politician). And it … Continue reading →

Stolen Guns

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One way criminals gets guns is to steal them, or to buy guns from gun thieves. The question is if this is a major source of crime guns, and where is the leakage occurring? The answers are serious though the data is convoluted. Takeaways A net 154,746 guns (stolen minus recovered) enter the underground in a year. They are overwhelmingly taken from civilians. Most disappear from vehicles, not homes. Public carry is not a predictor of gun theft rates, but the adult population is. Gun theft rates are not covariant with gun homicide rates. A crabby note about data Data quality is the bane of research, and data quality on this issue is inconsistent. We’ll include rants about data as we explain our findings, but for starters, we’ll note that snapshot data (i.e., a one-year picture) is divorced from long-term data, and the long-term data required us to triangulate factors. … Continue reading →

K–12 Shooting Stats

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School shootings are reasonably rare, though you would never know if from reading stories in the mainstream media or listening to people who maintain databases of questionable quality. Fortunately, the federal government did a deep dive into the subject, and from that we come to some interesting conclusions about who is actually in danger at K–12 schools and why it only reinforces what we know about gun violence in general. TAKEAWAYS The most commonly media-cited K–12 school shooting database is overstated by 40%. Most K–12 shootings are over disputes that align with inner-city and street gang subcultures. School-targeted shootings (which include mass shootings) occur at about half the rate of “nominal” dispute/gang shootings. Targeted shootings, because they are planned, come from generalized grievances, and use “cattle pen scenarios,” have a higher body count than the more common one-victim dispute shootings, though the latter occurs twice as often. What is a … Continue reading →