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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We think of gun violence as associated with urban areas in politics for sure, but is it true? New data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks both gun injuries and deaths, has recently been made available for the years from 2014 through 2023. It paints perhaps the most comprehensive picture of gun violence in America over the past decade. Now, nationwide, gun violence has gone up during that decade.

While it's coming down in many bigger cities, rural areas, particularly in the South, are experiencing a disproportionate amount of gun violence per capita. The data shows that nearly one out of every two shootings that they analyzed took place outside of large metropolitan areas. Let's take a closer look. Joining us now with his analysis of the new data and to talk about how policy changes have contributed to this alarming trend, especially in certain states, Chip Brownlee, a reporter at The Trace, a nonprofit news site that covers gun violence. His latest is titled, You're More Likely to Be Shot in Selma Than in Chicago. Hey, Chip, welcome back to WNYC.

Chip Brownlee: Hey, Brian, thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us more about this Gun Violence Archive in the first place. I know one of the things that we've talked about here before is that federal law, because the gun lobby is so powerful, actually prevents some gun-related data from being collected and disseminated. What do we have?

Chip Brownlee: That's a good point. The Gun Violence Archive is a nonprofit. What they do is they use media reports and police reports and other publicly-available data to gather information about gun violence incidents across the country. One thing that's really valuable about the Gun Violence Archive is that they do this in pretty much real-time. They're already tracking shootings that are happening today and that information is available on their website.

There is some federal data that we have about gun deaths across the US. While that data is quite reliable, it's only about gun deaths usually. It doesn't often include injuries, people that are wounded from being shot and not killed. The other problem with a lot of the federal data is that it's very slow. We still don't have final numbers from 2022 or 2023 in the Gun Violence Archive because it's tracking deaths and injuries and it's pretty much in real-time. We have a more comprehensive picture from that.

Brian Lehrer: What you learned is that half of all shootings between 2014 and 2023 occurred outside of large cities in small cities and towns of fewer than-- well, cities of less than a million people and smaller towns. I guess what you're saying is or what you discovered is half of all shootings took place in places where a lot less than half the population lives, right?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, pretty much. We think all the time, like you were talking about earlier, that gun violence is this urban problem that it's an issue that's specific to big cities. Even though we know, for example, that New York City is very safe compared to other large cities across the country and what we learned from this data, even safer per capita than a lot of small cities in rural areas, is that these big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, there's a whole list of these that get coverage in the media all the time as being these hubs of gun violence. What the data actually shows is that it's the smaller cities, especially in the South, that have actually the highest rates of gun violence.

Brian Lehrer: Do you relate this to changes in the law in certain states over the last 10 years as the gun rights lobby has become more powerful and culture war polarization around the issue has increased and different states have gone in different directions?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, I think we've really seen this bifurcation over the last decade really, which aligns with this data of a lot of states, again, in the South, but also a lot of states in the Midwest too that have past laws like permitless carry, for example. These are laws that allow people, adults to carry loaded firearms out in public without any requirement for training or being required to get a license.

We've also seen a lot of these states in the South and the Midwest pass things like stand-your-ground laws, which essentially increase your legal right to use deadly force in an incident where you feel threatened. All of these states passing these laws like permitless carry and stand-your-ground, what it's really doing is increasing the likelihood that there's going to be guns out in public, and that people feel either empowered to use them or to use them in situations where if you have a gun at your side and you get in a fight at a bar, if the gun wasn't there, you probably wouldn't pull it out and shoot a person in the bar.

If you're now carrying a gun pretty much everywhere you go, an incident like that like a fight could easily turn into a shooting. I don't think it is a coincidence that the states that have the highest rates of gun violence are often these states in the South and the Midwest that have permitless carry and these other lax gun laws. In this article, we didn't really go into actually trying to draw causal conclusions like that.

What we do know from research is that very-loose concealed carry laws, looser gun laws in general, and higher rates of gun ownership are associated with higher rates of gun death. Even though we didn't actually try to draw any causal conclusions in this reporting, the research that's out there that we have, there's not a ton of it for other reasons that we could talk about if you want. The research that's out there does support that conclusion that looser gun laws do result in higher gun deaths.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some questions or comments for our guest, Chip Brownlee, a reporter at The Trace, news organization that covers gun violence, 212-433-WNYC, on this finding from analyzing 10 years of the national Gun Violence Archive that gun violence is more likely to take place in smaller cities and towns in the United States than in large metropolitan areas.

Anybody from a place like that listening in right now and have any reactions, observations as to why or if the politics around that seem to be changing as statistics like these become more known, 212-433-WNYC, or anyone else with a comment or a question, 212-433-9692, call or text. The article is called, You're More Likely to Be Shot in Selma Than in Chicago. Why do you use Selma as the poster city there? I'll say that for much of the country, people who don't know the Selma area at all, they generally think of it as the place where that civil rights march in 1965 took place and don't know much else.

Chip Brownlee: Unfortunately, when we started going through this data, one of the first things that jumped out to us was that Selma, this small city with this really important place in American history, actually had the highest rate of gun deaths of any metro area or city in the US over the last decade. I think that really hits home when you think about that fact. I'm from Alabama and I live in New York now. A lot of the cities that showed up in this list that we have are cities that are in Alabama.

There are also small cities in Mississippi like Jackson or cities in Louisiana like Shreveport that showed up pretty high on this list. I think that really cuts against, again, this narrative that's in politics and in the media often that the cities that have the biggest problem are Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia when, in reality, it's these cities and these states in the South where there is this attempt to spread guns everywhere really.

Brian Lehrer: The four states that you found have the highest rates of shooting fatalities and injuries were Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, plus Illinois, I guess. Which one does not belong? It's Illinois. The other three are all connected down there, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.

Chip Brownlee: I think another important thing that we should talk about in this conversation too is that all of this data isn't to say that there aren't cities like Chicago that have a gun violence problem. I think it would be totally inaccurate to say that Chicago isn't plagued in a lot of ways by gun violence. Most of this data that we publish in the article is, as you were talking about earlier, per capita data, so it's suggested for population.

If you look at the raw number, a lot of the big cities do have a lot more shootings, but they also have a lot more population. I think that's also part of the reason why Illinois showed up high on this list is because, yes, Chicago does have a gun violence problem, but there are places in the South that have similar problems that don't get the same coverage. That's part of what we were trying to do here is to show everybody that gun violence is not just a big-city problem. It's a problem across the country in cities large and small.

Brian Lehrer: Also, not just Chicago, but smaller cities in the Midwest also experiencing an increase. You especially honed in on youth gun violence there. Any particular smaller Midwest cities you want to mention?

Chip Brownlee: Yes. Unfortunately, the data shows that there's a lot of cities in the Midwest that have problems. One of the ones that we mentioned in the article is Peoria, where gun violence has increased a lot over the last decade. Another one is Milwaukee. We talked to people who told us that a lot of that increase has been driven by youth violence there. I think there are also some reasons not to hone in specifically on teenagers.

This is a problem that is really a young adult problem too, but it really is the younger people in these places that are contributing to this problem. At least that's what we were told. The Midwest, there are a lot of cities there that have similar problems to the South. They're also in states that have loose gun laws. Another thing about that that was undergirding a lot of what we were seeing in this data is that a lot of the cities that we looked at have really significant problems with segregation and racial marginalization that plays into this too.

We'll probably be exploring that in some more articles to come, but I think there are so many things that go into this problem from the gun law aspect, but also from, again, social supports that aren't there in a lot of these places. Racial marginalization that contributes to this gun violence has a lot of roots. There are many different reasons why a city or a state could show up high on this list.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Do these data show the same increased likelihood for school shootings as a subgroup or is it more general?"

Chip Brownlee: This is more general. We didn't look specifically at any particular types of incidents like school shootings or mass shootings, but we have in other articles before and we've seen similar increases in mass shootings, for example. I think it is likely that we have also seen, over the last decade, increases in school shootings, but we didn't get into that in this article. One thing we did know or did find from this data is that shootings of young people increased significantly over the last decade, especially shootings of teenagers, but not all of those shootings are happening in schools or around schools that would show up as a school shooting in the data.

Brian Lehrer: You also note in your article that while mass shootings are the most visible manifestations of American gun violence, mass shootings account for less than 5% of the nation's gun violence tolls. Of course, there are a lot of individual shootings. That's where it really tends to pile up the victims, but they're not spectacular enough to make the news in the same way.

To the point of mass shootings and some connected issues, listener texts, "The reason gun violence has raised in rural places is because it's a male violence problem against female partners. They have the highest rate of homicide, including in mass shootings. People always brush off that the first murders involved in a murder spree tend to be females close to the perpetrators." That's something we've talked about on the show.

I don't know if it relates to the data in this study exactly, but it just happened again in one of the mass shootings that was in the news. The person first shot. I don't remember if, in this case, it was a wife or girlfriend or their mother, but we see that time and time again. They do that first and then they go to the site of where they perpetrate the mass shooting. I don't know if there's anything to relate there to what you found.

Chip Brownlee: No, I think you're exactly right there. There's been a lot of research about that actually showing that a significant portion of mass shootings are related to domestic violence. We didn't look specifically at that issue in this data, but one of the cities that we looked at actually was Wichita, Kansas. The number of shootings there increased 60% between 2014 and 2023. The local officials there attributed that to domestic violence. What the listener or what the caller there is saying about domestic violence contributing to some of this would add up with that, I think, and that makes sense to me. I don't think that that is all of the increase, but it certainly is probably a big portion of it, I would say.

Brian Lehrer: Relevant to the finding that shootings are increasing disproportionately in the South, Wilson in Bushwick has something to add, I think. Hi, Wilson. You're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Wilson: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. Yes, I'm glad that your guest mentioned the racialized aspect of this as well. I am a Black man from Tennessee. Originally, West Tennessee rural area. I grew up around guns. My family always had guns. However, my cousin, they had guns in the house. Her husband shot her and then called 911 and then killed himself. Tennessee has also the state that recently has loosened their gun laws and then there was a shooting in Nashville that happened.

Also, one other thing that I want to say is that these open-carry laws are also racialized because Black people can't walk around carrying guns because they will be shot, especially in the South. I'm just wondering what your guest has to say about that as well like what happened in Florida or we can go back and forth about this. We can even go back to the Black Panthers. Black Panthers can't walk around with guns. That's why gun laws started. I want to continue that conversation about the racialization of gun laws in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Wilson. I'm sorry for the losses in your family and that horrible incident that you described. Chip, he brings up several important questions.

Chip Brownlee: I think, first of all, thank you for sharing that. It's not just the concealed carry laws that are racialized, I think, too if you look at other laws like stand-your-ground, which have also been shown to contribute to increased gun deaths and the research. That same research shows that Black people are more likely to be shot in incidents like that.

I think there are so many various different racial aspects that play into this that lead to situations where people in Black communities who really struggle with gun violence are faced with an increased threat from gun violence because of things like that, but also because of communities that are under-resourced that have not been invested in, communities that are, in many ways, over-policed and under-policed in other ways where there are many shootings that go unsolved. I think there's, like the caller said, so many racial aspects to this that play into this that make it just a very difficult thing to unravel.

Brian Lehrer: Wilson, thank you. Please keep calling us. Do the data show that gun violence follows poverty?

Chip Brownlee: We didn't look at that, but there is a ton of research out there about that. I think that research does show that poverty and gun violence are often correlated. That plays into that, what we were talking about earlier too.

Brian Lehrer: Listener asks, "Where can we access this gun violence data set if we wanted to download and explore it ourselves?" Can people do that?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, so you can see our analysis on The Trace website, thetrace.org. If you want to download the source data and look at it and peruse it yourself, you can do that on the Gun Violence Archive website, which is gunviolencearchive.org. One thing that's interesting about that is if you go into their website and use their search tools, a lot of the questions that came up in this call or in this segment that I didn't really have answers to like the school shootings and the mass shootings, you can filter for things like that on the Gun Violence Archive if you go through their search panel. You can select different types of incidents and stuff that you want to look at. I think it could be really helpful, I think, for more people to look at some of that data themselves. You can look at where you're from if you want particular information about that too.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Daniel in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Daniel.

Daniel: Hi there. Thanks for taking my call. While I was waiting, I just got a citizen alert that shots were fired in Bed-Stuy. My question is, Chip, do you have a perspective on whether a future with a diminished NRA or even the disappearance of the NRA will lead to better access to gun violence data or do you think that upcoming or recent decisions by the Supreme Court may hobble government entities from collecting that data? Thank you.

Chip Brownlee: That's a great question. I think that, actually, the federal government is getting a little bit better at some of this data stuff. One of the things we saw last year was that the White House, President Biden, started this White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. One of the things that they've been doing actually is having conversations with the Gun Violence Archive about their collection of data.

Then also I think one of the things that they want to do is just generally improve the federal government's collection of data like this that's helpful. There's also things going on at the CDC that are making the data collection there better. Some of that is starting to become public. I think one of the things that is still difficult as far as federal data is information about injuries. The federal data is pretty good about gun deaths, but the injuries is where it lacks. I think that stuff is already getting better.

I don't know if it's directly related to the decreased lobbying influence, I guess, of the National Rifle Association and other gun lobby groups, but it is getting better. I think there's definitely a ways to go. No matter who it is, I would hope that people would want better data on things like this. This is such a big problem and it affects a ton of people. It's the leading cause of death for children in the US. You would think that we would want good data on this subject. I don't think really anybody, no matter who they are, should be standing in the way of that.

Brian Lehrer: Daniel, thank you for your call. To wrap it up, we've been talking about the places in the country where the rate of shootings has gone up in the last 10 years. You found there were just six states where the rate of shootings decreased. I'm going to name them because six is easy enough to name. Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Go New Jersey. Why there? Is something happening differently to cause shootings to go down in those six states while they're going up around the country?

Chip Brownlee: Yes, I think there's a bunch of theories about why that's happening. New Jersey has invested a lot in things like community violence intervention programs. These are programs that use what are known as credible messengers to go out and try to diffuse conflicts before they turn into actual shootings and gun violence. That's one thing New Jersey has done. New Jersey has also passed a slew of gun reform legislation over the past decade.

A lot of that was related to the Bruen decision, but nonetheless, I don't think we can say exactly why New Jersey is one of these states where shootings have declined. There's theories like that like the community violence intervention and the laws that they've passed. One thing I do want to say about that is that these six states that had these decreases, it doesn't mean that the rate decreased smoothly over the last decade.

All of these states still had quite significant COVID spikes. It wasn't a smooth decrease. These states weren't immune from the problem too. I think it's encouraging that there are some places that gun violence is going down. I wish we could say exactly why. It's just we still don't know why, for example, in the 1990s, gun violence declined so much. These things are very hard to unpack, but I think we have some ideas.

Brian Lehrer: Well, certainly, a takeaway from this conversation is that the law should probably change at the federal level to allow more analysis of gun use and gun injury and gun violence data. There is the Gun Violence Archive, which is a nonprofit organization that tracks both gun injuries and deaths. The information in that archive was recently made available for the years 2014 through 2023. My guest, Chip Brownlee, a reporter at The Trace, a nonprofit news site that covers gun violence, has written up some findings from looking at the data. The article is called, You're More Likely to Be Shot in Selma Than in Chicago. Chip, thanks for sharing it with us.

Chip Brownlee: Thanks so much for having me.

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