Shootings are a better measure of gun violence than murders are. There is a lot of randomness in what happens once a bullet leaves a gun — whether someone lives or dies depends heavily on luck. Focusing just on murder leaves out all the people who could have died. And it ignores the life-changing injuries and emotional trauma that often accompany nonfatal shootings.5
But gun violence researchers are often forced to focus on murders rather than shootings for one simple reason: better data. Cities are not required by the FBI to track shootings specifically, and many cities choose not to count them.6 Some big cities that had high murder rates in 2016 — such as St. Louis and Memphis, Tennessee — do not collect shooting victim data. And even cities that do collect and release data on shootings often leave out key details; many, for example, don’t distinguish publicly between fatal and nonfatal shootings.
The uneven data collection leaves a major gap in our understanding of gun violence. Looking at shootings, it turns out, shows that the cities with the worst murder rates do not inherently have the highest rates of gun violence victimization, as measured by shooting victims per capita. Murder rates, therefore, may better serve as a measure of how lethal shootings in a city are than as a measure of that city’s overall level of gun violence.
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It appears, then, that shootings in Baltimore and New Orleans tend to be more deadly than those in Chicago, contributing to the former two having consistently higher murder rates than Chicago. What isn’t clear is why. Answering this question would provide tremendous insight into the mechanics of gun violence in U.S. cities and could help cities devise strategies for lowering their murder rates. But the question is hard to answer without more complete, more detailed data.
