American Gun Violence: Defining the Problem
How is it measured? What adverse and aspirational benchmarks can we use to contextualize current rates?
The 2021 US overall homicide rate (HR) of 6.0 per 100,000, including but not limited to firearm incidents, was several magnitudes greater than most peer democracies. Grinshteyn and Hemenway (2016) attribute the disproportionately high American homicide rate to the US firearm homicide rate (FHR), which was 25 times greater than other rich democracies during the 20-tens. Considering the exceptional amount of gun violence in the US, comparing American homicide rates to peer democracies is illustrative, but imprecise. More often, historically high or low domestic HRs and FHRs serve as reference points. These peaked in the 1990s and bottomed out during the 2010s (Kena & Truman, 2022). The era of the “great crime decline” traversed these decades.
The US HR and FHR are highly correlated, with homicide rates in the 1980s and 1990s largely driven by firearm violence in the nation’s most populous cities, where rates were at least 3 times greater than the national rate and at least 70% of homicides involved firearms (Gramlich, 2022). When major US cities became less violent in the late-1990s, this dramatically reduced the national HR and FHR (Karmen, 2000). Additionally, while homicides decreased most in urbanized counties (5.1% annually), gun violence consistently fell in all but the most rural counties from 1989 to 1999 (Branas et al., 2004). This confluence of fewer gun homicides in both urban and rural areas sustained a downward trend that brought the national FHR from an all-time high of 7.0 in 1993 down to an all-time low of 4.0 per 100,000 by 2014, a point around which it hovered until 2018. I therefore reference the 1980 US peak HR of 10.2 per 100,000 and 1993 peak FHR of 7.0 as “adverse benchmarks” for homicides and firearm violence, along with El Salvador’s recent world record HR of 52.01. Conversely, 4.0 FHR represents an “aspirational” domestic benchmark, along with the 2021 OECD average HR of 2.6 per 100,000.
Source: Wade, M. M. (2023). “Not as Bad as the ‘90s”? Firearm Violence in Small, Mid-Size, and Large US Cities, 2015–2021. Homicide Studies, 10887679231163287.
There are discrepancies across official sources reporting El Salvador’s homicide rate. Some reference the 2018 HR as 53; others 52 per 100,000. When I wrote this analysis I was working from a source that cited 52 per 100,000. Either way, 52 /53 homicides per 100,000 is high! However, in 2022 El Salvador’s homicide rate plummeted by 85% due to the government aggressively cracking down on gangs that perpetrate most of the country’s violence.