Perhaps more guns explains why we have more gun homicides and more gun crimes

June 14, 2021

In this prior post on recent media coverage and political punditry focused on rising crime rates and their political implications, I noted my frustration that these discussions too often elide important data suggesting that it is primarily gun-related crimes that are on the rise while other crimes may still be on the decline. Again this backdrop, I found notable this new Vox piece by two data scientists headlined “One possible cause of the 2020 murder increase: More guns.” Here are excerpts:

It’s true that police activity, as measured by stops and arrests, declined significantly in 2020. Still, despite that drop, and weeks before Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests, police began finding firearms more often than in previous years.

This pattern does not support the idea that overwhelmed police forces weren’t able to take guns off the streets, leading to a surge in violence. Instead, the spike in firearms as a percentage of stops and arrests provides evidence that there were simply more guns on the streets throughout 2020 than in the past, which may have intensified other sources of violence and contributed to the historic rise in murders. While there is no standardized, national open data on stops, information on police activity in 10 cities that we compiled points toward the same pattern….

The share of stops or arrests that resulted in a firearm being found increased in every city. In Washington, DC, the share of all arrests that were weapons violations went from 5 percent in January to March 2020, to 7 percent in April and 9 percent in May. The share of arrests for weapons possession went from 1 percent between January and March 2020 in Charleston, South Carolina, to 4 percent between April and December. Almost every city followed the same pattern: a dramatic jump in the share of arrests or stops with a firearm in April and May, a decline in June, and a return to the earlier elevated levels for the remainder of the year.

The implication of this trend is that — assuming police did not suddenly become substantially better at identifying who has an illegal gun — firearm carrying increased at the beginning of the pandemic, well before the protests, and persisted at that level for the remainder of the year. It is possible that in the midst of the pandemic, police started engaging in better-targeted stops that were more likely to yield arrests. But finding other kinds of contraband, like drugs, did not become more frequent, only guns….

Police finding more firearms in stops and arrests does not fit with the idea that a decrease in proactive police activity targeting firearms was the major driver for 2020’s historic murder totals, though it certainly cannot be ruled out as a contributing factor…. The data all points to substantially more complex causes behind the rise in murder than the simple narrative of a change in policing as the sole or even main driver. It is plausible, though, that the summer’s drops in stops and arrests, protests against police violence, and increases in gun violence are all symptoms of the same disease: what criminologists David Pyrooz, Justin Nix, and Scott Wolfe recently called a “legitimacy crisis in the criminal justice system,” the result of intensifying distrust in “the law and its gatekeepers” as a result of injustice….

The trend toward more firearms sales and more guns on the street seems to have continued into 2021. Background checks accelerated even beyond last year’s peak in the first three months of this year. And the latest data from these cities’ stops shows that police are finding as many guns as they did in the second half of 2020.

Early figures from many cities show murders have increased from last year’s baseline as well. If the greater availability of firearms contributed to last year’s violence, the latest arrest data suggests it may contribute even more deaths to 2021’s murder total.

A few of many prior related posts: