Author Topic: Why Are Shootings Deadlier In Some Cities Than Others?  (Read 312 times)

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Offline EC

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Why Are Shootings Deadlier In Some Cities Than Others?
« on: February 22, 2017, 08:49:51 pm »
Murder is a bad statistic for measuring gun violence, yet almost any discussion of gun violence in the United States requires its use.

Consider the cases of Baltimore and Chicago in 2016 to see why murder can be misleading. Chicago, despite its reputation for violence, last year had roughly 28 murders per 100,000 residents, which ranked eighth-highest among big cities1 in a FiveThirtyEight analysis of 2016 murder rates. Baltimore, by contrast, had the second-highest murder rate in the country, at 51 per 100,000 people. Because firearms are involved in the vast majority of murders,2 those statistics might make it sound like gun violence is a far bigger problem in Baltimore than Chicago.3

But the opposite is true: Chicago last year had more shootings4 per capita than Baltimore. It’s just that a smaller share of Chicago’s shooting victims ended up dying.

Shootings are a better measure of gun violence than murders are. There is a lot of randomness in what happens once a bullet leaves a gun — whether someone lives or dies depends heavily on luck. Focusing just on murder leaves out all the people who could have died. And it ignores the life-changing injuries and emotional trauma that often accompany nonfatal shootings.5

But gun violence researchers are often forced to focus on murders rather than shootings for one simple reason: better data. Cities are not required by the FBI to track shootings specifically, and many cities choose not to count them.6 Some big cities that had high murder rates in 2016 — such as St. Louis and Memphis, Tennessee — do not collect shooting victim data. And even cities that do collect and release data on shootings often leave out key details; many, for example, don’t distinguish publicly between fatal and nonfatal shootings.

The uneven data collection leaves a major gap in our understanding of gun violence. Looking at shootings, it turns out, shows that the cities with the worst murder rates do not inherently have the highest rates of gun violence victimization, as measured by shooting victims per capita. Murder rates, therefore, may better serve as a measure of how lethal shootings in a city are than as a measure of that city’s overall level of gun violence.

Read more: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-are-shootings-deadlier-in-some-cities-than-others/

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