Young men in violent parts of Philadelphia, Chicago die from guns at a higher rate than US troops in the heat of battle
Mass shootings tend to dominate the debate over gun violence – but they accounted for just 3% of all firearm homicides in the United States in 2021.
- Mass shootings tend to dominate the debate over gun violence – but they accounted for just 3% of all firearm homicides in the United States in 2021.
- The vast majority of gun homicides are murders that happen in an extremely concentrated number of neighborhoods – places where the rate of gun deaths rivals war zones.
Concentrated disadvantage
- These same neighborhoods tend to suffer from what criminologists call concentrated disadvantage – an unsavory mix of high crime rates, illegal drug markets, poverty, limited educational and economic opportunities, and residential instability.
- Cumulatively, these factors decrease the residents’ ability to maintain public order and safety in the ways that safer neighborhoods do informally by confronting violent behavior or supervising teenagers.
- The demographics of these neighborhoods means that both victims and perpetrators of shootings are disproportionately young Black men.
- Young Black men represented 93.9% of firearm-related homicide victims in Chicago and 79.3% of gun homicides in Philadelphia – where young Hispanic men make up another 12.9%.
How we did this work
- Our paper is published in JAMA Network Open, an open-source medical journal, and is freely available to read.
- We first collected all publicly available city-level data on shooting deaths, including the time, exact place and information about the victim.
- Our study focused on Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago because they were the largest American cities with public data available.
In military zones
For the military casualties, we relied on the estimates from studies of the mortality of U.S. soldiers at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Afghan War was deadlier, with 395 deaths of U.S. combatants per 100,000 people per year, compared with 330 in Iraq. We used the higher rate from the Afghan War as our reference, setting its value as 1 and expressing the homicide rate in other places in relationship to this benchmark.
How places compare
- The violence of these city streets was captured by sociologist Elijah Anderson in his ethnographic study “Code of the Street,” published in 2000.
- During 2020 and 2021, this ZIP code was home to about 2,500 young men.
- Young men living there were 3.23 times more likely to die from a bullet than U.S. service members deployed to Afghanistan.
- Moreover, survivors of this violence bear the burden of it for the whole time they live in these neighborhoods.
Complicating the narrative
- Answering them can better help us understand the limitations of our study.
- For example, many service members do not engage in active combat.
- The brigade had a casualty rate 1.71 times higher than our benchmark.
- It is also worth noting that we studied two particularly violent years in U.S. cities.
Faster care could help
Our research also showed that soldiers who are injured on the battlefield are less likely to die from their wounds than people shot in the American cities we studied. Surviving a wound is more likely if medical help is immediate. This suggests two ideas to decrease shooting deaths: train more police officers to provide urgent basic medical treatment to the victims of gun violence and add capacity to trauma centers near violent neighborhoods.
Alex Knorre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.