Increasing Murders but Overall Lower Crime Suggests a Growing Gun Problem

The article by Feinglass et al. in this issue of AJPH (p. 795) provides an interesting window on the immense human toll associated with assaultive gun violence (not even including the costs from gun suicides and accidents) by focusing on hospital visits in Cook County, Illinois, for gun assaults from 2018 to 2020. Shortcomings with the hospital data may give an exaggerated impression of the extent of the recent increase in shootings, and some discussion on how the situation in Chicago compared with that in the nation overall and other large cities may provide useful context for considering the broader homicide picture in America.

URBAN AND NATIONAL CRIME TRENDS

After the major crime increases that plagued the country during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, the national murder rate peaked at almost 10 per 100 000 in 1992, decreased to 4.4 per 100 000 in 2014, and then rose to 6.5 per 100 000 in 2020 with a particularly sharp jump in the final year as the nation struggled with the coronavirus disease pandemic, the social unrest after the death of George Floyd, and a binge of gun buying.¹

As in the nation as a whole, the homicide picture in 1992 was similarly bleak for its four largest cities: the murder rate in Chicago, Illinois, peaked at 33 per 100 000, and it was 31 in Los Angeles, California. New York City and Houston, Texas, had only a slightly lower rate, tied at 27.

By 2020, the picture was quite different. New York City had done the best, with a murder rate of 5.7 per 100 000, and Los Angeles was next with a rate of 8.8. Despite the sizable murder jumps of 2020, these two cities still had 79% and 72% lower homicide rates, respectively, than they did in 1992.

In contrast, the situation was much worse in 2020 for Houston, with a murder rate of 17.3 per 100 000, and Chicago now suffering with a murder rate back up to 28.8 per 100 000. Houston’s rate of murder, which was identical to New York City’s in 1992, is now three times higher than New York’s. Chicago is even worse, with a murder rate in 2020 that is five times higher than that of New York and more than three times higher than that of Los Angeles.

Interestingly, Houston initially followed the same pattern of the sharply declining murder rates in New York and Los Angeles until about 1996, when its improvement flagged as Texas increasingly became a “gun-friendly” state even as New York City and Los Angeles continued to lower their murder toll while tightening their regulation of firearms.

The pattern in Chicago was somewhat different. Its downward trend in murder after 1992 was far slower than in the other three cities. Chicago’s murder rate bottomed out at 15.2 per 100 000 in 2014, only to nearly double by 2020. The federal court decision that mandated the introduction of the right to carry concealed weapons in Illinois starting in 2014 likely contributed to the poor crime performance thereafter.² Houston’s benign trend in murders ended around 1996, the year that Texas adopted its right-to-carry law.

THE LESSONS FROM THE LARGEST FOUR CITIES

Two lessons emerge. First, 2020 was a terrible year for all these cities as gun sales soared throughout the nation, but New York City and Los Angeles still had dramatically lower murder rates that year than they did in the early 1990s and dramatically fewer murders than Houston and Chicago. Superior gun regulation and less gun prevalence are almost certainly part of the explanation for why cities in California and New York have fewer homicides than cities in Illinois and Texas, but guns and gun laws alone are not the whole story; otherwise, Houston would have a higher rate of murder than Chicago.

Second, the malign influence of right-to-carry laws and other measures that loosen the restrictions on firearms is particularly worrisome because the US Supreme Court seems poised to strike down restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons in a major Second Amendment case it heard in November 2021. The conservative justices on the Court showed little awareness that their ostensible ardor for allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons more freely would start moving New York and Los Angeles murder rates in the direction of those of Houston and Chicago.

MURDER ROSE IN 2020 BUT NOT OTHER CRIMES

Surprisingly, as bad as the murder increase was in the last year of the Trump administration, the overall crime picture in 2020 was not as bleak. Although the national murder rate rose that year by a stunning 28.7% according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime rose only by 4.7%, and property crime actually decreased by 8.1%, reaching a new low.³ Strikingly, the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that violent crime for households across the United States decreased by 21.9% in 2020.

The crime pattern in Chicago is even more starkly divergent. First, Table 1 underscores that the ostensible 100% increase in hospital visits for gun assaults from 2018 to 2020 described in the abstract of Feinglass et al. substantially overstates the true increase in shootings in the city because there was only a 36% increase in murders (and a far smaller jump in aggravated assaults). Second, although it is not hard to believe that policing in Chicago has been worse than in New York and Los Angeles, one sees that, during this three-year period, overall Chicago crime was not skyrocketing: rape and robbery decreased substantially, and overall violent crime and property crime decreased in Chicago. Of course, just as the gun assault hospital visit data are flawed, one always needs to consider the accuracy of American crime data, which is notoriously less accurate than it should be.

TABLE 1—

Crime Statistics in Chicago, Illinois: 2018–2020

Year	No. Cases or % Change
Murder	Rape	Robbery	Aggravated Assault	Burglary	Motor Vehicle Theft	Total Property Crime	Total Violent Crime
2018	567	1 857	9 681	15 315	11 725	10 115	87 247	27 420
2019	492	1 761	7 983	15 296	9 578	9 081	81 158	25 532
2020	771	1 346	7 869	16 597	8 643	10 053	60 166	26 583
% change, 2018–2020	35.98	−27.52	−18.72	8.37	−26.29	−0.61	−31.04	−3.05

Source. Chicago Police Department Uniform Crime Reporting Program reports.

MORE GUNS AND LESS GUN REGULATION

What can we distill from this array of conflicting patterns in crime? When murders and shootings are rising while rape, robbery, and burglary are all falling sharply, one can rule out a general crime wave unleashed by police “pulling back” or the leniency of progressive prosecutors. The evidence that (1) murder and shootings are rising when gun sales are skyrocketing, (2) the percentage of homicides committed with a firearm was the highest ever in 2020,⁴ and (3) weakening gun laws and promoting concealed carry elevate violent crime^5–8 suggests that increased gun sales and weak gun regulation are having their predictable lethal effect.

The Supreme Court should recognize this before it renders its coming Second Amendment decision.