How to dramatically reduce gun violence in American cities

This week, Americans woke up to familiar headlines: Over the July 4 holiday weekend, six people were killed and 66 were hurt in shootings in Chicago. Eighteen people were shot in St. Louis. Seventeen in Boston. It was another marker of what often feels like an intractable urban gun violence problem in America.

But in his new book Bleeding Out, criminal justice scholar Thomas Abt argues that it does not have to be this way. He presents a vision for dealing with urban violence by fundamentally rethinking how law enforcement and other government resources are used — a cost-effective solution that could save lives, while being more palatable to both political parties than sweeping gun control.

Gun violence in the US is often talked about as if it’s a single problem. But it’s really at least four different ones: suicides, urban gun violence, domestic violence, and mass shootings. Suicides are the majority of the nearly 40,000 gun deaths in the US in 2017. But urban violence is the second biggest category, making up a majority of the 14,000 gun homicides that same year.

“Since October 2001, 410 people have died in domestic terrorist attacks and 520 have died in mass shootings,” Abt writes. “During that same period, at least one hundred thousand lost their lives to urban violence.”

While rates of crime and violence have declined since the 1990s, the decline has been uneven. Since 1991, homicide rates have fallen by 86 percent in New York City and 73 percent in Los Angeles. But they have increased in Indianapolis (up 64 percent), Pittsburgh (53 percent), Phoenix (23 percent), and Baltimore (13 percent). And America still leads the developed world in gun violence.