The New York Times finally published a comprehensive analysis of gun violence trends acknowledging everything that I've been screaming into the void.

Is my work finished?

I started researching gun violence in over 1000 cities in response to disingenuous, hyper-partisan, and lazy media accounts of American gun violence during the pandemic, when the firearm homicide rate increased 30% in 2020 compared to the previous year.

I created the 1000 Cities Project after a dishonest reporter from Salon cherry-picked data from my academic research to support a false narrative about gun violence being worse in smaller US cities than larger cities.

I wanted journalists to stop gaslighting people who expressed concern about increasing gun violence in their communities. I wanted the media to stop casting aside such concerns by telling us that things were “not as bad as the 1990s” in every article about the increase in gun violence during the pandemic. I wanted them to do some real fucking reporting on what was happening, where, and to whom.

In the meantime, I did what I could as an academic researcher at a small university with zero resources, a heavy teaching load, and a small audience.

So today, I felt an enormous sense of gratification when I read this analysis by the New York Times.

The data visualizations are impeccable and highlight the exact things I’ve been saying: violence is no longer contained to large cities. Communities that previously never had shootings now experience routine gun violence. Violence increased in red and blue states/cities during the pandemic, in states with strict gun control legislation and permissive laws alike. Things are also improving, but the new normal is worse than it was in the mid 20-teens. This is the reporting we deserve from the New York Times.

Is my work done? We’ll see how long it takes for the media to forget this. The framing of the article (blaming the pandemic) is also superficial, but the comments section (which is now closed) contains enough criticism of the falsehoods perpetuated in the framing of the analysis to help set the record straight. Nonetheless, I am incredibly encouraged that tens of millions of people now have access to this information.