Deadly Shootings Decreased 27% Across the Largest US Cities
Charlotte stands out as the only city where gun murders rose 17% in 2024
This interactive chart shows fatal firearm counts for 13 of the largest US cities with populations greater than 1,000,000.1
Compared to the previous year, gun murders in 2024 declined most in Jacksonville (-100%), Philadelphia (-69%), and Phoenix (-47%). They also fell substantially in San Jose (-38%), Dallas (-31%), and Columbus (-24%). By contrast, Houston (-4%), San Diego (-3%), and Chicago (-2%) experienced the most modest decreases in fatal shootings.
Charlotte stands out as the only city where gun murders rose 17% in 2024 over the previous year.
Importantly, gun fatalities in Charlotte spiked prior to the pandemic, when in 2019 they roughly doubled compared to the previous year. They increased again in 2020 along with most other US cities. In 2024, the city hit an all time high of 124 firearm homicides, including 111 intentional/offensive homicides, compared to 89 in the previous year.2
According to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) 2025 Crime Report, overall (reported) “violent crimes” are down, but homicides, aggravated assaults, rapes, and arsons are up.
Violent crimes: 7,413 offenses in 2024 compared to 7,215 offenses in 2023.
Homicides: 111 in 2024 compared to 89 in 2023.
Aggravated assaults: 5,679 in 2024 compared to 5,542 in 2023.
Rapes: 232 in 2023 compared to 256 in 2023.
Arsons: 162 in 2024 compared to 143 in 2023.
As the only large city where overall violence trends haven’t reversed, and appear to be worsening, the CMPD should not rush to celebrate their violence crime data.
Comparing Firearm Homicide Rates of Major American Cities
Because population sizes of these large cities vary, city gun violence amounts are compared using the Firearm Homicide Rate per 100,000.
There were over 500 firearm fatalities in Chicago (pop: 2,792,099) in 2024, resulting in a Firearm Homicide Rate (FHR) of 20 per 100,000. Likewise, Houston (pop: 2,489,196) had approximately 400 gun homicides, giving the city an FHR of 16 per 100,000. These cities had the most fatal shootings and highest FHRs in 2024, but such numbers don’t automatically correspond. For instance, there were a couple dozen more fatal shootings in LA compared to Charlotte and Columbus in 2024, but LA has over 3.8 million residents compared to slightly over 1 million in those cities, resulting in a substantially lower FHR per 100,000 in LA compared to its smaller counterparts.
In Sum - Over 500 fewer people were killed with a gun across these 13 cities in 2024 compared to the previous year!
While some cities are lagging, most are making incredible strides in improving public safety and saving lives. Let’s hope this trend continues in 2025! I’ll attempt to track this trend mid-year by reporting firearm violence trends during key summer holiday weekends, especially Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.
Data for New York City, disaggregated by borough, will be reported in an upcoming post.
* Gun Violence Archive (GVA) firearm fatality data includes “victims” and “suspects” killed by firearms. This means if a suspect is killed by the police or a civilian in a defensive shooting, these deaths are included in GVA data. The term homicide is often conflated with intentional murder, but it also includes unintentional, reckless, negligent, and justified killings. (It never includes suicides, because homicide requires one person killing another, not oneself.) Police exclude some of the latter killings from their reporting of “homicide” stats if they are determined to be non-criminal and/or justified homicides. This explains discrepancies between police criminal homicide stats and Gun Violence Archive firearm homicide data. Sometimes I’ll reference police crime stats for context, as I do in this post, but I only use GVA data in my data analyses, so slight discrepancies are constant across all cities. This tradeoff is acceptable (to me) because the overwhelming majority of firearm homicides are intentional shootings, not defensive or accidental shootings, and I cannot access police department-level data for the 1300 cities included in this dataset.