The United States tops the world in both gun ownership and prevalence, as well as gun incidents, injuries, homicides, and suicides.

The US is the only country with more firearms than people, and state gun laws vary greatly.

On a state-by-state basis, there have been few in-depth statistical investigations, and the authors believe this is the first analysis of its kind.

A new study finds that during civil unrest at the start of COVID-19 lockdowns and the murder of George Floyd in mid-2020, gun violence increased in only a few U.S. states.

The study, which was just published in Chaos, used novel data analytic techniques to pinpoint and comprehend changes in the patterns of gun violence in the United States between 2018 and mid-2022.

The study’s co-authors, Dr. Nick James of the University of Melbourne and Dr. Max Menzies of Tsinghua University, said that their results go against what people think and what the news says about more gun violence across the country in mid-2020.

Dr. James, a research fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Data Science, said that the study looked at April 2020 as a trigger point when U.S. media reported widespread violence and civil unrest because of COVID-19 lockdowns, George Floyd’s death, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests.

“Minnesota, where George Floyd was killed, experienced the greatest change in its gun violence behaviour immediately after Floyd’s death,” adds Dr. James.

“Prior to this event, Minnesota had experienced a decrease in gun violence incidents. This data highlights the complex social and cultural interplay of gun violence and social injustice within the U.S.”  

The study analyzed gun violence cases registered by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that collects real-time data from law enforcement, government, and commercial sources.

Dr. Menzies said the state-by-state analysis challenges mid-2020 media gun violence reporting.

“Despite media reporting on rising trends, we only found a few states with a clear “up-down-up” surge in gun violence activity in mid-2020,” says Dr. Menzies, adding “some states, most of all Texas and New York, exhibited an increase in gun violence post-2020 compared to pre-2020, but others, most of all Florida and Massachusetts, exhibited a decrease.

“This is contrary to some of the reporting in the U.S., which focuses more on uniform national trends and may miss details at the state level. We analysed both raw increase and decreases in total magnitude of events, as well as which states exhibited the greatest shifts in periodic behaviour, which we termed dual-domain analysis.

“We didn’t see any patterns in terms of red or blue states, which is another interesting finding of our work.” 

Using a method called “time series analysis,” the study found “change points” that happen when the number of gun violence incidents goes up or down in a big way.

Using a technique called hierarchical clustering, researchers were able to classify the 50 states into three groups. As for the first group of states (a total of 24), no significant shifts were found throughout the whole 2018–22 study period. A smaller group consisting of 12 states had a single change point toward the end of 2021.

Only the third group of seven states shows a clear summer jump in 2020. Most clearly, this 2020 summer surge was seen in Ohio, New York, and Missouri.

Image Credit: Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images

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