How the Pandemic Reshaped American Gun Violence

Taking a stroll around the neighborhood is a routine activity for many Americans. Yet for 47 million people — about one in seven — such a walk would pass near the location of a recent gun homicide.

The number of people living this close to fatal violence grew drastically during the pandemic years, a New York Times analysis has found, as a surge in killings not only worsened gun violence in neighborhoods that were already suffering but also spread into new places.

To assess the impact of the pandemic years, The New York Times created a map of every gun homicide in the United States since 2020, using data collected from the police and news media accounts by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. For every block where Americans resided, The Times then drew a quarter-mile circle to determine how many people lived in close proximity to the killings.

Often, it was not just one killing, but two or three. In extreme cases, a dozen fatal shootings or more fell within those circles.

“There are a lot more guns on the street and when people get angry and frustrated, instead of getting into a fistfight, they get into a gun fight,” said Dr. Regan Williams, an emergency room director at a Memphis children’s hospital who has seen a spike in young shooting victims.

Though the level of violence has fallen since the worst days of the pandemic, Americans are still shooting and killing one another more frequently than they did in the years before the coronavirus arrived. The long-term impact of the surge in violence is being felt in many corners of the nation, and researchers will undoubtedly study it for years to come.

“We’re taking a few steps back from the cliff,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency room doctor who directs a violence prevention research program at the University of California, Davis. “But there are some ominous developments. What happens in a society that is increasingly violent, increasingly mistrustful, increasingly polarized, increasingly indulgent in hate rhetoric?”

The Times mapped homicides to better understand not only the numbers of direct victims but also the communities most exposed. The analysis revealed that gun deaths spread into new neighborhoods during the pandemic: An additional 8.7 million Americans now live on a block near a gun homicide — a 23 percent increase from the prepandemic years.

But even as the geography of fatal shootings expanded, killings also rose sharply in the nation’s existing centers of violence. These neighborhoods saw the worst of the surge, perpetuating a pattern of concentrated violence that long predated the pandemic. More than half of all gun homicides still occurred in neighborhoods where just 6 percent of Americans live.

“You don’t want people to think that everywhere is so dangerous in a way that it’s not,” said John MacDonald, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who reviewed The Times analysis. “On the other hand, you don’t want people to think that, oh, this is just somebody else’s problem. It’s not happening in my neighborhood.”

One thing the pandemic did not change is the sharp racial disparity in the communities most exposed to fatal shootings. Black people were five times as likely to live near a gun homicide as white people, while Latinos were three times as likely, Asian Americans were twice as likely, and Native Americans were 1.4 times as likely. The violence mostly followed patterns of housing segregation, which often leaves people of color living in poorer neighborhoods where crime rates are often higher.

Gun suicides, which outnumber homicides and were not part of The Times analysis, have been rising steadily for years and reached a record number in 2022. The demography of gun suicides is vastly different, with rates higher for white men and in rural areas.

An Expanding Footprint

Criminologists have offered several explanations for the drastic rise in the number of fatal shootings during the pandemic:

A rise in gun ownership made it more likely for violent disputes to become deadly. An increase in drug use, and drug dealing, made violent conflicts more probable. The disruption of public schools abetted an expansion of youth gang activity. And an upheaval in policing led to reduced enforcement in many cities.

The police say many of these factors contributed to what happened in Senator Henry M. Jackson Park in Everett, Wash., over Thanksgiving weekend last year. Mayor Cassie Franklin was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by the sounds of a gun battle near her home, which the police attributed to a turf war between two street gangs. Police recovered more than 50 shell casings and the body of a 17-year-old boy.

Everett is a city of 110,000 north of Seattle that is a hub for aerospace manufacturing. It is one of many smaller American cities where the number of fatal shootings both increased and spread during the pandemic years.

“Most people weren’t focused on violent crime because it was only impacting a small demographic, a small portion of our community,” Ms. Franklin said. “Now we’re seeing violent crime throughout different parts of Everett and more of our community is starting to pay attention and care about it.”

City officials are now prioritizing combating gun violence but say they have challenges: The fentanyl epidemic has spun out of control, and the police force is understaffed after state lawmakers tightened regulations on how the police can engage with criminal suspects.

When George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer early in the pandemic, it set off an anti-police protest movement around the nation. In Everett and elsewhere, the result was more difficulty in recruiting police officers to do the kind of work necessary to curb crime, said the chief of the city’s Police Department, John DeRousse.

“We were one of many states where officers became really reluctant to do their jobs,” he said. “Police departments were losing officers at rates higher than they’ve ever seen before.”

Down the West coast, the California city of Vallejo has also confronted a big spike in violence, with policing at the center of the discussion. Local officials say the city has too few officers, which has allowed gang activity to flourish. But community leaders blame long-running mistrust of police as central to the crime problem. In April, the state attorney general reached a settlement with the Vallejo force requiring a broad range of reforms, a situation spurred by years of allegations about police misconduct.

“If you were to compare us to Oakland or San Francisco, we don’t have the level of support or the same level of resources,” said Andrea Sorce, an economics professor who is running for mayor of Vallejo. “So, yeah, when something hits like the pandemic, we do get hit hard.”

Askari Sowonde, a professional event planner and community activist, said residents are concerned with crime but still wary of the police.

“People are angry about both,” she said. “We don’t like the fact that some of these other people are killing each other and we have to talk about that, too. But let’s also deal with these police officers. Let’s not push that away.”

Overall, the footprint of violence spread in four out of five major U.S. cities. In Atlanta, the percentage of residents exposed to nearby gun violence rose to 58 percent during the pandemic years, up from 36 percent in the four prior years. In Columbus, Ohio, the exposure went to 41 percent from 28 percent.

Pockets of Violence

Even as violence spread in cities where it had been relatively low before the pandemic, it also intensified and spread in the places that already had high homicide rates.

Memphis is one example. Fatal shootings hit a new high in 2023, and in November, a former city council member, now a state senator, wrote to the governor and asked for enforcement help, saying the city was “under siege.”

Dr. Williams runs the trauma unit at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and said the number of children and teenagers wounded by gunfire more than doubled during the pandemic, including 96 children 5 and under who suffered gunshot wounds.

“During Covid, we were so worried about the effect that it had on older people,” she said. “But we failed to recognize the effect of our children being out of school, and being out of normal socialization.”

In poorer communities, children rely on public institutions like schools and recreation departments to provide structure, and when that support was cut back during the pandemic, poorer children were more likely to suffer the consequences. Dr. Williams said many young people dropped out of the school system when society shut down, and never rejoined.

“There’s just a lot more children in the community that don’t have any way to stay busy and be occupied, and that’s getting them into trouble,” she said.

Memphis had more than a thousand homicide victims during the pandemic but the impact was even broader, since more than 335,000 people lived on blocks in close proximity to the violence — 83 percent of them Black or Hispanic. Some researchers believe more attention should be paid to these indirect victims.

“Neighborhoods that have persistently elevated levels of violence have lots of trauma across many people,” said Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, a sociologist on the California, Davis, violence prevention project. “That impacts relationships between neighbors and translates into collective senses of fear.”

Most major cities contained both mostly safe areas and pockets of violence. Chicago has a national reputation for high gun violence, but on the ground, nearly a third of the city’s population lived in neighborhoods with very few shootings, while more than a quarter of the residents lived on blocks where the violence was extreme.

New York and Los Angeles, meanwhile, had relatively low homicide rates overall, but those figures masked the presence of some of the nation’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

This geographic disparity was reflected in the large differences in exposure to violence for people of different races. Black people were already far more likely to live near shootings before the pandemic, so when violence spiked, they were most likely to be affected.

In Milwaukee, for example, where shootings are so frequent that more than a third of white residents lived near one, their Black neighbors had it far worse: 83 percent lived near a gun homicide.

“These disparities become especially stark when we start talking about more than one incident of gun violence during the past year,” Ms. Kravitz-Wirtz said.

Debate Over Reforms

While homicide rates are falling in many parts of the country, they are still higher than prepandemic levels, and in some places they are still going up. The policy implications are still playing out in two primary areas: the battle over gun regulations and the debate over the role of policing.

Congress responded to the crisis by passing bipartisan “Safer Communities” legislation in 2022. It expanded background checks for gun buyers 21 and younger, incentivized states to enact “red flag” laws to temporarily confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous to society, and provided hundreds of millions of dollars to community-based, street-level gun violence prevention efforts.

In addition, dozens of states strengthened gun-safety bills, such as laws requiring a permit to purchase new firearms.

“There’s been tremendous progress at the state level,” said Kelly Drane, the research director at the Giffords Law Center, a gun violence prevention group that advocates for stronger regulations. “And there is also at the same time, this competing reality that there are states that are actively weakening their laws right now.”

Many local leaders have sought to confront long-simmering tensions over policing and the way suspects are prosecuted. More than 140 justice reform bills passed in 30 states in 2020 and 2021, measures that are still controversial in some jurisdictions.

“Everything seemed to be getting at making crime less costly to commit or making law enforcement more costly to do,” said Rafael A. Mangual, a fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute who studies criminal justice. “I think people are unwilling to sacrifice the level of safety that was clearly sacrificed during the pandemic years.”

Whatever happens with the law and policing, researchers worry that the pandemic has left the nation more prone to gun violence than before.

“We are, as a society, experiencing long Covid,” said Dr. Wintemute, the University of California epidemiologist. “I don’t mean the physical effects of having the illness. We are only beginning to come to terms with the social damage that this pandemic has done.”

He added: “Many people’s futures, many people’s trajectories were altered by the pandemic, very few of them for the better. We’re going to be dealing with this for a long time.”