2024 data for 1000 cities is in! Cities are (mostly) doing better.
With this data, I'll highlight good, bad, and ugly trends comparing 2024 to 2023, pandemic-era highs, and pre-pandemic lows.
I’m back with new data
The awesome people over at Gun Violence Archive (thank you, Sharon!) recently provided me with 2024 firearm injury and fatality incident data for over 1300 US cities. Homicides and injuries involving firearms are thankfully down nationally and in most US cities. Now that the story is no longer, “look at how bad things are everywhere,” I need to analyze this data and determine which trends are most noteworthy. Please bear with me while I steal time from my employer over the upcoming weeks to do this.
As a first crack at this, below are two visualizations. These are interactive, so click the link to see annual data for each city when you hover over the chart.
The first “the good” depicts almost all* mid-sized US cities where firearm homicide incidents (or firearm homicide rates per 100k) decreased in 2024 compared to 2023. The arrows point left to the decrease in firearm homicides in each city in 2024 compared to the previous year. Cities are shown in descending order of the overall decrease.
2024 Trends in Mid-Sized US Cities: The Good
2024 Trends in Mid-Sized US Cities: The less good
Below are almost all** mid-sized US cities where firearm fatalities increased in 2024 over 2023. Reported in descending order of the percent change increase from 2023.
*You’ll note that I omitted a couple of cities from the first analysis. I’m not hiding anything. Charts look unappealing when they include too many cities, so I removed places that consistently have low aka “aspirational” Firearm Homicides Rates (even during the pandemic) by US standards, i.e., <4.0 per 100,000. For more on aspirational and adverse FHR benchmarks and how I define them, read previous post here:
The omitted cities’ FHRs decreased too and such results should be celebrated. But it’s less newsworthy that Riverside, California’s FHR decreased from 2.2 to 1.2 compare to New Orleans, where the Firearm Homicide Rate decreased from a stunning 54 per 100,000 in 2024 to 40 per 100k in 2023.
**In the 2nd chart, I omitted cities with FHRs lower than 7 per 100k following a similar logic. It’s not great that gun murders increased in Chula Vista, California but with an FHR in 2024 of 1.6 versus 1.3 per 100k in 2023, I think it’s safe to say increasing gun violence isn’t among the city’s top concerns.
I’ll post charts of larger cities soon, stay tuned!