GUNSAn Analysis by The Trace of 150 U.S. Cities Shows One of the Greatest Drops in Gun Violence — Ever
Gun violence is trending downward for more than three quarters of cities with the most shootings, according to a new analysis by The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub. The downward trend cuts across red and blue cities and states in every region of the country.
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Gun violence is trending downward for more than three quarters of cities with the most shootings, according to a new analysis by The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub. For more than half of those cities, the rate of decrease is even greater than it was last year — when the drop in gun homicides broke all previous records.
The downward trend includes red and blue cities, in both red and blue states, in all of the country’s regions. It includes cities where shootings are traditionally sky-high, like Baltimore, and much safer cities, like Austin, Texas.
Amid presidential rhetoric of “warzones” and “hellholes,” an important data point is being overlooked. The 80 percent of Americans who live in cities will lose far fewer of their neighbors to gun violence this year.
“We’re in an unprecedented moment,” said John Roman, a senior fellow at University of Chicago’s NORC social research center.
“We traditionally say all crime is local,” Roman said. “This is a national story. National forces caused a spike and national forces are the explanation for why violence has declined. That’s a different way of seeing the world than we traditionally do.”
To assess the direction that gun violence is trending in various cities, the Data Hub analyzed the Gun Violence Archive, a dataset that collects public reports of shootings from sources like media reports and city crime dashboards. We fit a trendline to each city to isolate long-term underlying changes from expected seasonal ups and downs in gun violence and temporary blips caused by onetime events like the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. In places where the trend line is going up, gun violence is increasing. In places where it’s going down, gun violence is decreasing. The steeper the line, the faster the change is happening. (More details about the methodology are available on the dataset page.)
The results reveal variations on a theme across hundreds of cities: A steep spike beginning in 2020 or slightly after, coinciding with the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Then, a similarly high number of shootings in 2022, followed by steep decreases from 2023 on. Cities like Detroit and Philadelphia are now seeing the lowest rates of gun violence in decades.
