GUNSHow Many People Were Killed by the Pandemic Surge in Shootings?
In a new analysis, The Trace figured out the number of people who might have lived if gun violence had remained at its 2019 level.
Gun violence has a long tail.
Michelle Kerr-Spry knows this well. She is a gun violence survivor and a community activist with Mothers in Charge through which she supports women in Philadelphia who’ve lost someone to a shooting.
It didn’t surprise her when one day last December a woman came in seeking solace from a killing that took place three years ago, when the world seemed upside down from the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests around the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, when there was a general sense that society was coming unraveled.
Grief deferred is common, Kerr-Spry said.
“The circumstance is the homicide,” she said, “but the lifelong work is how do you try to recover and heal from that traumatic event — and that is a forever thing.”
Many of the women Kerr-Spry advises are among a group of tens of thousands of people whose lives were altered forever by the surge in gun violence that began during the pandemic. Though gun violence has returned to its normal (unacceptably high) levels in many places, the long tail of it, the shock and grief of it, will be felt for years to come.
In an effort to understand the scope of what was lost, The Trace analyzed over 220,000 shootings from the Gun Violence Archive. The shootings occurred between 2020, when the surge began, and 2024, when many places saw gun violence return to the pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
Approximately 18,126 more people died than would have if gun violence had remained at its 2019 level, according to our analysis.
About 27 percent of those killings — more than one in four — took place in majority African American neighborhoods in large cities, though such areas represent just 7 percent of all neighborhoods.
In other words, the burden of the unprecedented increases in homicides landed hardest on the very places that were already struggling with a disproportionate share of shootings and deaths.
During the surge, The Trace found, shooting deaths increased in nearly every type of neighborhood, including remote rural areas and leafy suburbs, across all races and ethnicities. But the lion’s share of deaths were found in large cities. Though African American neighborhoods experienced the most disproportionate share of deaths, both Hispanic neighborhoods and neighborhoods where people of color combined are the majority also experienced more than their share.
