Author Archives: Guy Smith

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 →

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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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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