US GUN VIOLENCE IS INCREASING AT ALARMING RATES

…Political cartoonist Tom Toles attitude about gun violence.

 

Washington DC and Oakland, are some of the most violent cities in America.

 

In most metropolitan cities, one of the most common complaints that the police departments receive is about hearing local gunfire. Shots being fired. That unnerving pop of a firearm being discharged.  There has been now for about 10 years, a new technology from Silicon Valley called ShotSpotter Technology (SST).  This is a technology that listens for a gunfire's acoustic signature and reports it to authorities.  It is being utilized in cities including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., St. Louis and Canton, Ohio.

 

In fact, in Canton last year, at least 772 bullets were fired in one tiny part of Canton, a city of only 73,000 people. That is more than two bullets every day.

 

As of this article, there are currently 62 urban municipalities nationwide, and more to come, that last year with SST, recorded 165,531 shots being fired.

 

That eye-popping number captures only a small number of the bullets fired each year. The data does not include data from rural areas or the nation’s two largest cities such as Los Angeles, that does not use ShotSpotter, and New York City was excluded from the 2015 tally because it did not start until mid-year.

 

Ms. Jennifer Doleac, assistant professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, studies the connection between gunfire and crime. “There’s a lot more gun violence than what is reflected in today’s homicide rates.”

 

In one study, they found that ShotSpotter data showed evidence of “severe underreporting” of gun violence when compared to the traditional metrics of homicides or 911 calls.  In Washington DC, just 1 in 8 gunfire incidents led to a 911 call for “shots fired” in the covered areas.  Also in Washington DC, there was one reported homicide for every 181 gunfire incidents.  In Oakland, CA, it was one homicide for every 62 gunshot incidents.

 

Counting the gun shots does not account for all the problems or all the times when a gun is fired in anger, or fear, or by accident and the bullet simply missed its mark. Yet whether a bullet kills or injures someone, it is usually a random outcome from a violent act. It is also influenced by the shooter’s aim.  If the bullet happens to strike vital organs, there’s the other problem of how far a victim must travel to reach a hospital or trauma center.

 

The negatives about ShotSpotter are that the system covers just a sliver of each city, usually high-crime neighborhoods. ShotSpotter’s total coverage was only 173 square miles last year. In addition, the device tends to not hear gunshots fired indoors.  But the data does start to provide a fuller picture of the nation’s growing events from gunfire.

 

Of those 165,531 gunshots last year, they were divided among 54,699 different incidents.  That’s an average of 150 gunfire incidents every day.

 

Of that data, the busiest gunfire month was May.  But unfortunately, the busiest gunshot day was not New Years, it was Christmas.

 

Ms. Doleac, and a Purdue professor Jillian Carr used ShotSpotter data for Washington DC to determine how the city’s juvenile curfew affected gun violence.  The ShotSpotter devices were rolled out first in 2006, in downtown, then Southeast and Northeast neighborhoods and finally north of downtown. The researchers examined gunshots detected from 2006 to 2013.

 

What they found was surprising: The city’s curfew actually increased the number of gunfire incidents by 150% in the hour immediately after it went into effect.

 

The researchers focused on the one-hour period when the city’s curfew changed, going from midnight every night in July and August to 11 p.m. on weeknights the rest of the year.

 

During that hour switch-over, they found, gunfire spiked. The researchers theorized that this was because law-abiding juveniles were most likely following the curfew. They got themselves off streets. That resulted in fewer innocent witnesses or bystanders in public, potentially leaving the city to the more lawlessness and all their gunfire. 

 

The study also noted with interest that Oakland’s gunfire was at least twice as deadly as Washington’s gunfire.  The researchers couldn’t come up with the reasons behind this difference.  Did victims in Oakland get to the hospital more slowly?  Unfortunately, the difference in how they measure gun violence.

 

The Urban Institute has looked at gunfire near the Washington DC schools during the 2011-12 school year. This policy Think-Tank found four schools faced a disproportionate share of shots fired nearby and they have called for more study of how gun violence affects Washington students.

 

Doleac has said she looks forward to wider adoption of gunshot detection systems.  “We need more data like this,” Doleac said. “It allows for a much better understanding of gun violence.”

 

That may all be true, but it’s also like closing the gate after all the horses are gone.  We already have more than one gun for every American of every age.  Having required background checks before you can buy a firearm, and getting rid of the bullet magazines that hold over 10 bullets would be good ideas in going forward..

 

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