Armed with Reason: The Podcast - Episode 14
Are gun homicides declining in the United States?
This week, Devin and Caitlin from GVPedia are joined by Chandler Hall, Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress (CAP), to discuss gun violence homicide trends, as evidenced in his recent CAP article, In 2023, Gun Violence Trended Down Across the Country.
You can listen to the chat via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.
We hope you’ll tune in and let us know not only what you think, but what you’d like to hear more about in the future. And if you are interested in recommending a guest, or even being one yourself, please let us know!
Given the abundance of gun violence in our country, it is critical to have the ability to discuss and advocate for a safer community. This podcast is one more way for the movement to do just that.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
Caitlin: Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Armed With Reason podcast, brought to you by GVPedia. This week, Chandler Hall, who is a Senior Policy Advisor from the Center for American Progress, which we commonly refer to as CAP, is joining us here for the episode. A few weeks ago, Chandler published an article on the Center for American Progress' website titled, "In 2023, gun violence trended down across the country." And he goes on to explain various facts and figures. But of course, something that sticks out to us here at GVPedia is that states with the strongest gun laws experienced larger declines in gun homicides. This certainly is not an anomaly for 2023, and what Chandler found. So hello, Devin, and thank you, Chandler so much for joining us here on the podcast.
Devin: Hello.
Chandler: Hey, thanks for having me.
Caitlin: Of course. So we're going to start off really easy. How about you just wrap up what you found for our listeners? Give us a little bit of insight into your article, and we'll go from there.
Chandler: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. So, you know, starting with the motivation, the article is motivated by our interest in exploring basically beneath the surface of some of the major headline news that's been reported on last year's violent crime data already. Specifically regarding the national murder rate. So by the end of last year and beginning of this year, based primarily on preliminary data available through cities data reporting, analysts are already estimating that 2023 will, go down as the largest single year decline in our country's murder rate on record. That's significant. That's obviously, massively worth celebrating, especially given the historic surge that we saw related to the pandemic. But also a little bit before that. However, you know, we wanted to understand more about what the composition of that national figure actually looked like. Specifically, understanding if that trend was being experienced evenly across the United States, or if it wasn't being experienced, which parts of the country are driving that historic decline in our country's murder rate, and which parts of the country might be lagging behind. So for this report, we specifically analyze the data through the lens of state gun laws to see if there was relationship between stronger gun laws and declines in gun violence in 2023 compared to 2022. We used Giffords' annual gun law scorecard to test this. And we found significant differences in gun violence trends last year based on the strength of state gun laws. And that was true especially at the highest and lowest end of the scorecard spectrum. So comparing states that received an A or A- grade from Giffords against states that received an F grade from Giffords last year.
We did a number of different tests. But one of the starkest examples of this difference is that we analyzed that data set of the 300 largest U.S. cities and found that cities in the states with the strongest gun laws experienced 19.4% fewer total gun homicides in 2023 compared to 2022. While cities and states with the weakest gun laws saw only a 5.1%, fewer total gun homicides last year compared to the year prior. So obviously, again, that's a stark example of the difference that we're seeing in our country in terms of how we're approaching the gun violence crisis.
But, definitely want to put that into context of, again, you know, there were decreases in large across the country. 36 states in total saw at least a marginal decrease; and a lot of those states saw double digit percentage decreases. And then even beyond that, some of the states that didn't see decreases still saw at the very least a flattening of their trend. And we only really saw five states plus D.C. that had gun violence go up significantly in their state last year compared to the year before. And again, you know, this is a, this will be I think accurately reported as a historic decrease year-to-year from 2023 to 2022. But again, putting into context, we are still above, the national figure of 2019, so we're still above pre-pandemic levels. And certainly this is, worth celebrating, as I said, but there is still lots of progress to be done if we if we want to ensure safer communities.
Chandler Hall; photo courtesy of Center for American Progress
Caitlin: Chandler, just in case we have any listeners who aren't familiar with it, can you give a quick synopsis of the Giffords Law Center's grading scale?
Chandler: Yeah, absolutely. That'd be helpful. So Giffords Law Center, they do an incredible job every year of releasing a scorecard that, evaluates states based on the strength of their gun laws. They look at a comprehensive list of and issues that go into that, covering issues in terms of permitless carry laws or restricting access to guns, as well as extreme risk protection orders. The monitoring of where guns can be carried, where concealed carry laws apply. And so they go really across the entire range of gun laws that can factor into this decision. They have a number of legal experts that they rely on every year to evaluate, those laws and their nuances of how strong or effective they are considered to be. And then, they every single year release that scorecard system. And have done this for, I believe, going back to 2014.
Caitlin: Great. Thank you.
Devin: Yeah. So just to hop onto something you mentioned earlier. Earlier about like, pre-pandemic gun violence. Your current study mostly looked at 2022 to 2023. And so I was curious whether the states with the strongest gun laws might have seen the highest increases during the pandemic and then are just sort of reverting to the mean, coming back to where that should be. Or is it the case that states with the strongest gun laws, had the lowest increases during the pandemic, and then now are having the highest decreases in gun violence after the pandemic?
Chandler: Yeah. So, perhaps unsatisfactory. I'm going to, keep you curious on that one. The short answer that I can give at this point is that we'll find out. We are planning a follow up to this report that will look at that very question and hopefully the entire range of questions related to this last four years, from before the pandemic, through the surge, and now as we kind of get away from the worst of the pandemic's effects. So we'll be doing a follow up report, and again, comparing these numbers with state gun laws to see if there is a trend on either side. And, you know, what we can, make of that. But, that being said, you know, we published a report last fall that looked at gun violence trends based on states political association, namely, how a state voted in the 2020 presidential election. And while that is just a point in time snapshot of a state's political identity and it doesn't reflect directly the nature of the state's gun laws, there is significant overlap between states with stronger gun laws and states that voted for President Biden in 2020. And based on that analysis at least we found that cities in those states saw less of a surge during the worst of the pandemic and bigger decreases so far since. So we'll be digging into that more, as I said. But, at the very least, that suggests that these findings are not just a reflection of states with the strongest gun laws seeing larger improvements this year only because they experienced larger surges in violence in the years prior.
Caitlin: Chandler, would you say there any data points that you came across that were particularly surprising to you?
Chandler: Yeah, definitely. You know, I always try to be kind of surprised by the data and not go in with expectations. But there certainly was. There are states that we typically think of as perennial examples of how state gun laws are working to reduce gun violence. And so I was surprised to see states like Massachusetts, Hawaii, Rhode Island, New Jersey that again are perennially have some of the lowest rates of gun homicides per person, or per population. And in this last year had only marginal decreases in their gun homicide rates or actually, in fact had small increases in their gun homicide rate year to year. So not what I was expecting. However, I think it's important, again, to put that into context and knowledge that those states are some of the lowest gun homicide rate in the country. And even with the small increases last year, they still remain some of the safest states in the country from gun violence when adjusting for population. Also, especially considering states like Hawaii and Rhode Island, which have such a small number of homicides each year, their year to year statistics are much more susceptible to essentially randomness. So individual or isolated events can have an outsized impact on their year-end totals, as compared to being kind of harbingers of a trend upwards or signs that there was a lack of progress there. And so, while that's like surprising, it does sort of fit into the overall kind of statistical framework that we would evaluate, you know, how states are doing and where we are seeing progress, or lack thereof. You know, another way to kind of like illustrate this point is Maine, for example, shows up in this data as having the largest single year percentage increase in their gun homicide rate in 2023, upwards of over 100% increase from the previous year. In a typical year, Maine has fewer than 50 deaths attributed to gun homicides. So, as you know, we're unfortunately all very well aware of the horrific Lewiston shooting last year in October, that saw 18 folks lose their life, that completely changes what their end of year total looks like. And so it's important to also just like, kind of put each of these numbers into context, especially the smaller states, that are much more susceptible to randomness rather than, again, being able to understand what is happening in terms of a trend of where violence is going in that place.
Caitlin: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, right? We know data is obviously very useful for a variety of things, but it can't be witnessed solely in a vacuum. You have to look at the whole picture. So we appreciate you doing that because it it makes what you're writing about seem more legitimate, right? It's more real and more reflective of what's actually happening in these communities.
Chandler: Yeah, I hope so.
Devin: Yeah. So I kind of wanted to follow up on permitless carry laws and seeing, like, if the data indicate something there. A couple of years ago, GVPedia released a study using CDC data on permitless carry states before 2019. Because we didn't quite have all the pandemic data in when we conducted the study yet. And also, the pandemic is such a massive shock to the system that it's going to kind of throw a wrench into any data analysis. And in that study, we found that states that passed permitless carry laws, on average saw their gun homicide rates increased by 22% versus a national average of 10%. And so I was curious, with kind of the slew of states that have just recently passed permitless carry, post-pandemic, whether you saw any sort of trends there for the 2022 to 2023 period; and particularly states like Florida and Ohio, where I know certain gun advocates have, one study -- and I hesitate to use the word "study" here -- from the Ohio AG's office showed that like six out of eight Ohio cities saw violence decrease. And so they declared permitless carry a success. And others have pointed to Florida and seeing some sort of decrease there. And so basically placing, if there are decreases there, that in context of the wider picture.
Chandler: Yeah that's a great point. And I think that goes right back to kind of what Caitlin was mentioning as well, right, is that we have to interpret all of this data in context. And even more so on that point of you mentioned the sort of wrench that got thrown into all of our analysis with the pandemic, and how we understand how policies and laws matter and are either helping or actually hurting communities. It's quite hard at this point, I think, to tease out any sort of causal inference of one policy over another, especially because we are seeing trends go down everywhere. We can still do, our best and come up with creative research designed to tease out the the difference in the magnitude of effect where places are going down that much more than other places, I think is, ripe for additional research. And it's certainly something that, again, that we're hoping to do with some of our follow-up pieces.
But, you know, we we also caution strongly against kind of claiming victory at this point anywhere that violence has gone down because, one, there's so much more work to do, that we are, again, still above pre-pandemic levels, and certainly that pre-pandemic level shouldn't be our kind of stopping point in terms of our goal. There's still far more work to do.
So, we definitely want to caution against that. I, you know, we talked previously. I knew that you were interested in particularly seeing the trends between permitless carry states and non-permitless states. And so, I did do some additional kind of number crunching for you on that. So specifically looking at Ohio and Florida, Ohio saw a 2.7% decrease year-to-year. Florida saw a 6.5% decrease year-to-year. And so that puts both of those states in the bottom half of states in terms of their percentage decrease in gun homicides from 2022 to 2023. So, again, they are not above the kind of average of where states moved last year. And so claiming victory because the gun violence went down in that one area is not considering how they sort of compare in context. Thinking about the larger picture, if we compare all 27 states that have some form of permitless carry or right to carry laws in 2023 against the rest of the country, the 27 states that had permitless carry saw gun homicides decrease by 5.4% last year compared to 2022, while the rest of the country saw gun homicides go down by 9.7% compared to 2022. So again, this is not conclusive evidence either way, but to the point that you made about existing research that's already out there, this is consistent with that. And I think that's where we still need to kind of rely on, you know, when we're making judgments or doing this analysis, this evidence is suggestive of a trend and, you know, more in getting towards causal inference. But really, if we want to know what is working, what isn't working, let's think about this in context of all the other research that already exists. And as you mentioned, there's plenty of that that exist that shows that right to carry laws not only are inconclusive at best in terms of preventing violent crime and reducing gun violence, but actually there's a lot of evidence suggests that they drive up firearm homicides and violent crime through the mechanisms of higher levels of gun theft and lower clearance rates among law enforcement. So, you know, this sort of gets to the heart of why we wanted to do this piece is making sense of this national trend so that folks can't point to an isolated statistic in their area. See that gun violence went down and then claim that, you know, porous gun laws in their region are working. And there's actually a really clear example of this that kind of came across our desk recently, and it's related to Florida enacting their permitless carry law in 2023, and that was that, in December, you know, we saw some noise on Twitter from folks trying to claim that Florida's permitless carry law, which went into effect in July of that year, was the reason why Jacksonville was seeing a big decrease in homicides last year. However, again, there's a bunch of mistakes in kind of jumping to that conclusion. First of all, as we've been talking about, broadly speaking, gun violence went down almost everywhere, permitless carry or not. So, you know, that's not to write off policies from having any impact on the trend. But again, simply looking at one state or one city and saying that homicides went down there, ergo, a particular policy worked is on its face a false conclusion. Because it may be that gun violence in Jacksonville could have gone down even further, if that law was never enacted. And actually particularly noteworthy about that example is that, you know, because someone reached out to us about this particular discussion, we ended up digging into the numbers a bit in Jacksonville and found that while, overall, indeed the year the numbers did show that Jacksonville's homicide rate in 2023 was lower than it was in 2022, if you compared only the period when the law was in effect. So July 1st to the end of December, compared to that same period in the year prior, in fact, their homicide rate was actually higher than the previous year. And so, again, in terms of like they're jumping to conclusions about their public safety gains, actually, all of those decreases happened in the six months before that new law was enacted rather than afterwards.
Devin: Yeah that's a really interesting bit of data. And as a brief plug to the Gun Violence Archive, one of the reasons I particularly like their data and use it consistently, and we have our data visualization project that looks into it, is because for CDC data or FBI data, you're stuck with how to do over the year, there's no way to get under that. And laws unfortunately aren't just passed on January 1st of years. It'd be a lot nicer if like politicians respected the academics and passed all laws on January 1st, but unfortunately that's not the case. So one thing I want to tie back to some previous research that CAP, or Center for American Progress, and you did was a paper -- I'm not sure whether it's a paper or a report or an article, depending on the Center for American Progress…
Caitlin: Semantics are very important here. We want to respect the semantics.
Chandler: Yeah, their editorial team will be coming for you after this.
Devin: Yeah. So I expect their email any moment after we publish this. So anyway, late last year, in the fall of last year you published a paper looking at cities in red states versus, cities in blue states. And one of the reasons for this paper, I would imagine, is that there's a common talking point among pro-gun advocates of like, Oh, yeah, like the murder rate in red states is bad, but it's not our fault. It's these basket case blue cities that are driving it up. And it's all the fault of these failed policies in blue cities. And that's where to blame gun violence. And so I was curious if you could elaborate a bit more on that research and what you found; and then kind of tie it into the 2022 to 2023 piece and see, like, did that research reinforce each other, or did you find somewhat different conclusions?
Chandler: Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, you touched on exactly what, our motivation was in doing that research in the first place, was fighting against that false narrative of quote unquote, Democrat-controlled cities, you know, being the most dangerous places in our country. A couple of things we found in that, so first of all, you know, again, we created a data set of the 300 largest U.S. cities using Gun Violence Archive data, as you mentioned, and looked at the political association both of the state, again, based on the 2020 presidential election, and the political association of the cities based on their mayoral party affiliation to test that narrative. You know, a couple of things we found, first of all, was looking at, you know, what is the right way even to start to, like, break down this analysis. Is it fair to compare blue cities to red cities, based on doing a number, looking at kind of the socio and economic as well as like racial diversity statistics between those cities? We conclude that it is, you know, you are not having an apples to apples comparison when you're looking at blue cities versus red cities. And so if you're trying to think of how policies matter or how the leadership of a state -- whether it be, Democratic or Republican leadership -- how that is influencing what is happening at the city level in terms of crime or gun violence. We found that, you know, you can not compare the two, that these are innately different things and you wouldn't compare, you know, you wouldn't compare New York to, you know, your town next door, kind of a ting. So whatever those differences are, you know, we looked at a number of different things that again, looking at, you know, median income as well as racial diversity and other factors that could contribute to gun violence and crime in general that, you know, we're not going to go into, but just kind of setting the stage of what is even the right way to think about this in a first place? And what we concluded was, again, that actually, when you start to control for some of these things and look at blue cities -- so quote unquote blue cities or cities that have their mayors affiliated with the Democratic Party -- if you're looking at blue cities in red states versus blue cities in blue states, one, that those are much more comparable in terms of all of those other, sort of, you know, variables that we'd like to control for. So that allows us to more clearly start to think about what is the actual causal effect of a city or state leadership. And found that cities in the blue states were significantly safer from gun violence than cities in the red states. And, you know, we got some pushback on whether this is even the right way to think of it. Should we be thinking about this at the city level or the state level? And as we wrote about in that piece, you know, there are a number of reasons to think about, what is happening in terms of gun violence trends by looking at state laws. For one, you know, cities and mayors -- as much as they can and are trying to do to mitigate against crime and gun violence in their cities -- in a lot of ways, their hands are tied when it comes to gun violence and particularly, the access and flow of guns in their cities. Because of something called preemption laws, states have enormous control over the laws that mayors and city governments can even pass in the first place. And so a place like Philadelphia, for example, as we covered in the piece has been, you know, litigating against the state, basically saying, please allow us to have the authority to control guns in our city so that we can do more to drive down gun violence there. And so that's number one; but then two also, cities like Chicago, as much as they can do and do do as well as the state does to prevent guns from coming into the city, because of their neighbors they're still vulnerable to the guns being trafficked over the border and coming into the city. So, again, you know, not having control over guns in the first place makes it really hard to actually, you know, fight gun violence in a meaningful way other than some of the other solutions that they are trying and implementing and also have, again, significant results in terms of community violence intervention programs and, and the like. But yeah, some, some kind of top line statistics from that. So from 2015 to 2022, cities in blue states saw an average gun homicide rate of 7.23, per 100,000 residents. And red states cities saw a rate of 11.1 per 100,000 residents. So again, just a huge difference between the population-adjusted gun homicide rates in cities in red states versus blue states. And then again, you were curious about the sort of surge in during the pandemic and how that relates to kind of the figures that we're seeing now afterwards. And in the same way, from 2018 to 2021, which was really the kind of peak of that pandemic era surge, red state cities experienced much larger decreases in gun violence rates than blue cities did. So not again, not a perfect overlap with state gun laws, but certainly significant, kind of the Venn diagram, you know, has significant overlap. So, you know, in terms of how this relates to the data that we're seeing now, we're hoping to now do some more follow-up pieces that can kind of more closely connect the dots, but are still confident that, you know, we're on the right track and that at the end of the day, these strong gun laws do matter, and they save lives.
Devin: And just clarify to make sure I heard that correctly -- cities in red states from 2018 to 2021 saw substantially higher increase in gun violence than cities in blue states?
Chandler: Yeah, yeah.
Devin: Okay, yeah. So that would, while it's not a direct 1-to-1 correlation with my previous question on states, it would be rather indicative that it's not just a return to the mean for that. And kind of a slight bit of commentary given that we're recording this the day after the Kansas City Super Bowl celebration shooting, and like some of the commentary from pro-gun Twitters like, Oh, well, it's this blue city again. And, kind of ignoring that Missouri has been a basket case of gun laws for decades now. In 2007, they repealed their permit-to-purchase law. A 20-something percent increase in gun homicides in 2017. So a decade later, they introduced permitless carries, saw another 15% increase over three years. They have the preemption laws that you mentioned that basically tie the hands of state leaders to where they can't really do anything. I think one of the police chiefs was even kind of frustrated with that and the commentary afterwards, like we're trying to do things, but this is what happens when you have lots of guns. And then in 2021, they declared themselves a Second Amendment sanctuary state, which means that, according to them, state officials cannot enforce federal gun laws. And now thankfully that was overturned in 2023 by the Supreme Court, declining to uphold it. But still, like, that's kind of the direction Missouri's going. And tragically it highlighted the problems once more.
Chandler: Yeah.
Caitlin: I think a point that you brought up quickly is really important to highlight, which is the impact of community violence intervention, right? So if we're just looking at the pictures of a state and we're not looking at the stories that are told in the cities -- which Devin mentioned, our Data Visualization Tool, you can see, like, visually a couple dots here in the suburbs, and then so many dots in the cities you can't even read the entire city's name. Right? And that's in all states. Red, blue, purple, doesn't matter. The gun violence prevention movement for a long time, I think, really wasn't sure how to move forward in this world of, okay, we have the guns, what do we do about it? How do we keep children safe? How do we make sure they can walk to school? How do we make sure people go to the grocery store? How do we make sure that people can just be out and about without having be caught in the crossfire? And the CVI, community violence intervention, is critical in that. And I just bring that up here because while some states are good about putting forward funding to support those programs, others are not. And even the states that are good at it, typically on an annual basis, have to continuously say like, hey, we need more money, we need more money, we need more money. So that's for me in looking at how we can move forward in the gun violence prevention movement and who do we support, who needs the most support, who's impacted by gun violence the most? While it's not necessarily the story the media tells, we know it's the people, the families living in the cities. All right, so one final question for you. Why does this data matter, and what types of disinformation do you think it helps to counter?
Chandler: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think we've touched on it in a few ways, but, you know, in terms of the disinformation in particular, again, I think we're starting to see a number of folks react to local declines in gun violence and violent crimes as confirmation that whatever approaches they've taken so far to mitigate against these harms or promote public safety is working. But given that broadly we are seeing major declines all across the country or are returning to a sort of, pre-pandemic normalcy, we run the risk of thinking too myopically about those solutions. Are right to carry laws driving down crime and gun violence, or did they just implement it at the right time? And our writing is sort of like a statistical, you know, downwards wave? That's the kind of question that I think going forward we need to untangle. The good news is that there's already a lot of data out there to help us figure out right from wrong. To answer some of these questions, even not, you know, going outside of just the last year or two, or, you know, since the pandemic, as Devin mentioned earlier. You know, I don't want to pour cold water over folks who are well intentioned and have committed a ton of resources to solving this problem, and in fact, quite the opposite. Caitlin, as you mentioned, you know, states and cities that are investing in some of the smarter solutions to preventing community violence, that are, you know, taking that public health approach to it. They need more investment now than ever before, and are facing like fiscal cliffs that are really going to threaten the progress that we are making. But, you know, that's exactly the point is that we have a large and growing body of evidence showing what is and isn't working. And that's these community violence intervention programs, as well as stronger gun laws. And so, you know, this data, my my hope for it is that, you know, this is by no means meant to be the only data source that sort of points to why stronger gun laws and these solutions matter, but it is consistent with a much larger body of research that already shows this, shows that these laws matter, that they protect lives. That community violence intervention strategies are working. And then while, on the other hand, permissive gun laws and laws that lead to less accountability are having the opposite effect. And so, again, this kind of fits into hopefully a larger picture of the research on this. And being that it is consistent with that research is just even more suggestive evidence, rather than necessarily being the single causal kind of like point to look at. And as I said, you know, we're hoping to do even more follow-up research on this, really trying to get down to the the nuances and nitty gritty of the last four years and what caused this surge in the pandemic. You know, can we even start to understand what that was? And what are the solutions coming out of that that we do need to continue to invest in? We're hoping to show more of that in the future.
Caitlin: Yeah. And there's just part of the conclusion of this article that I wanted to read here for our listeners. One, just so they have it, and also maybe it will entice them to go on to the CAP website and, and read the whole article. But the conclusion says, "Historic declines in gun violence across the country in 2023 are evidence that progressive public safety strategies, in particular stronger gun laws, are making families safer." And then you go on to highlight a couple of ways that we've witnessed that this year. And then you say, "However..." -- there's always a caveat in gun violence prevention, right? --
"However, it is important not to lose sight of how much more needs to be done to protect families from the daily impacts of gun violence. Even though 2023 is estimated to have experienced a historic double-digit decline in the national murder rate, gun homicide rates are still above pre-pandemic levels. Now is the opportunity not only to sustain progress, but also to deepen investments in evidence-based solutions in order to end the United States gun violence epidemic once and for all."
So we can talk about pre-pandemic levels. The reality is that was still over 100 people a day in the United States dying of of gun violence, which is certainly not acceptable. And sometimes we joke here, we say flippantly, I think it's kind of a defense mechanism, right? Like, maybe one day none of this will exist anymore and we won't have jobs? And that's a fantastic thing, right? There's not a lot of professions where you walk around, you know, maybe like cancer researchers, right, who say, like, maybe one day this won't be a field that people have to go into because we will have figured out the solutions and we will have made our country a safer place. But unfortunately, that's not where we are at the moment. But we know that the work that you are doing and the rest of the team at CAP make a really big difference. And so I just want to thank you for, again, taking the time to put this article together, and then also to join us here on the podcast to discuss it.
Chandler: Thank you. Yeah, thank you again for having me on. Thanks for the opportunity.
Caitlin: And then when you come across more research and you put it out, feel free to reach out to us and we'd be happy to dig into that with you as well.
Chandler: Yeah, absolutely would love to.
Caitlin: All right. Fantastic. Thanks so much.
Gun image by MikeGunner from Pixabay.