Gun violence anywhere is unacceptable. Yet increasingly, Americans are forced to grieve the unimaginable horrors of school and hate-motivated shootings in innocent communities, in addition to the daily occurrence of gun violence across the United States.1 It is no wonder that Americans see gun violence as a top issue for Congress.2 To stop gun violence in this country, every lawmaker at every level of government must come together to pass commonsense gun laws and stop violence before it happens. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.
Even though gun violence is an epidemic—touching the lives of Americans everywhere—instead of passing stronger gun laws, Republican leaders are choosing to weaponize the issue for political gain by using misinformation to stoke fears of “Democrat-controlled” cities. In 2022, for example, after a shooter took the lives of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) claimed that gun violence in the cities of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago is evidence that tougher gun laws are “not a real solution.”3 Similarly, despite evidence that New York City actually has relatively low rates of gun violence when controlling for its size,4 in April 2023, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) used his powers as the House Judiciary Committee chair to hold a field hearing on violent crime in Manhattan5 to disrepute Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg after Bragg brought charges against former President Donald Trump. These examples demonstrate a larger coordinated effort6 by conservatives to make violent crime a “Democrat” issue while at the same time diverting attention from their own public safety failures to address gun violence, including neglecting to make it harder for individuals with violent intentions to obtain a gun.
However, despite the millions of dollars spent on this misinformation campaign,7 the data on gun violence homicides in America paint an entirely different picture. Original analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund on the 300 most populous U.S. cities comparing gun homicide rates from January 2015 to August 2023 finds that, after controlling for population size:
- Cities in blue states,8 based on how a state voted in the 2020 presidential election, are consistently safer from guns than cities in red states, regardless of which party is represented in city leadership.
- From 2018 to 2021, red-state cities experienced larger increases in gun violence rates than blue-state cities.
- In 2023, blue-state cities are experiencing larger declines in gun violence rates than red-state cities.
Not only do blue-state cities on average experience lower rates of gun violence in each year of the study, but now, gun violence rates appear to be decreasing faster on average in these cities than in red-state cities. Put simply, the data do not back up the blame-game politics of Republican lawmakers such as Texas Gov. Abbott and Rep. Jordan.
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Blue states are safer from guns
First, it is important to recognize that gun violence is not a problem unique to large American cities. Rural communities, particularly in red states, are experiencing some of the highest rates of gun violence in the United States.9 For example, from 2016 to 2020, 13 of the 20 U.S. counties with the most gun homicides per capita were rural.10 Furthermore, while Republican leaders want to center the public narrative around gun violence on “Democrat-run”11 cities and states, red states have experienced higher murder rates than blue states in every year from 2000 to 2020.12 And the difference is not driven by gun violence happening disproportionately in large cities. According to Third Way, even when the largest cities in each red state are removed from the analysis, the overall murder rate is still 12 percent higher than in blue states across that entire period.13 However, this does not fully answer the question about what violence looks like in American cities and whether there is a strong correlation with political affiliation.
From 2016 to 2020, 13 of the 20 U.S. counties with the most gun homicides per capita were rural.
Blue-state cities have lower rates of gun homicides
In October, the FBI is expected to release audited 2022 crime data through its Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which is the standard for law enforcement crime data reporting in the United States. Unfortunately, due to the FBI’s recent transition from the Summary Reporting System to the NIBRS, nearly one-third of law enforcement agencies will have missing or incomplete data, including major city police departments such as Los Angeles and New York.14 Moreover, because the FBI’s NIBRS data are a year behind and will only report statistics for 2022, these data cannot provide insights into more recent crime or gun violence trends. Given these issues with missing or incomplete reporting and the inability to analyze gun violence trends closer to real time using this dataset, the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), an independent data collection organization that collects data “from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources,”15 currently provides the most reliable, incident-level, up-to-date data that researchers can leverage to study gun violence at the city level.
An original analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund of GVA data on the 300 most populous U.S. cities reveals that after controlling for population, blue-state cities are consistently safer from gun violence than red-state cities. From 2015 to 2022, cities in blues states saw an average gun homicide rate of 7.23 per 100,000 residents. In red-states cities, that rate was 11.1 per 100,000 residents—53 percent higher than the rate in blue-state cities.
https://www.americanprogressaction....cing-larger-declines-in-gun-violence-in-2023/
