A harrowing new study lays bare the grim reality of America’s violent crime epidemic.
Researchers at Harvard University analyzed a generation of Chicago gun violence data collected from 2,418 residents between the years 1995 and 2021 to determine shooting exposure by race, sex and year of birth.
“The idea here was to take a lifetime perspective,” one of the study’s authors, Harvard professor Robert J. Sampson, said in a news release Tuesday. “When does exposure to gun violence occur? How does that change over the course of a lifetime? And how do those patterns vary based on race, gender, and all the social changes that are taking place?
The study findings are shocking: About half of black and Hispanic respondents reported seeing a shooting, and they were just 14 years old on average at the time they witnessed it.
Meanwhile, more than 7% of Black and Hispanic respondents reported that they had been direct victims of gun violence, first shot at an average age of 17.
“Particularly for black and Hispanic men growing up in urban neighborhoods, seeing someone shoot or be shot before the age of 20 is pervasive,” the study bluntly stated.
Of the 2,418 Chicago residents who participated in the study, exactly half were men and half were women. In all, 37% were black, 16% were white, and 47% were Hispanic.
To be eligible, respondents had to be born in one of four separate years (1981, 1984, 1987, and 1996), as the study authors wanted to determine which specific age groups were most affected by gun violence.
The authors concluded that those born in 1981 and 1984 were more likely to have witnessed gun violence, as crime rates peaked in the early and mid-1990s, around the same time they came of age.
In 1995, 14-year-olds (b. 1981), the median age a respondent reported witnessing a shooting, there were 827 homicides in Chicago, according to official city police records.
In the same year, a whopping 12,182 cases of aggravated assault involving a weapon were recorded in the Windy City.
Crime rates dropped dramatically in subsequent years, meaning those born in the 1987 and 1996 cohorts were less likely to have witnessed gun violence.
“The 1987 cohort reached mid-to-late adolescence during the low-violence period of the early 2000s, while the two older cohorts reached the same stage of development in a more violent era in the 1990s,” he explained. the study.
However, crime rates in Chicago have started to rise again in recent years, raising new fears that younger cohorts may be more exposed to gun violence.
“In 2015 or 2016, violence in the United States, but particularly in Chicago, started to skyrocket,” Sampson explained, noting that the vast majority of homicides are committed with firearms.
In 2021, Chicago reported 800 homicides, just 27 fewer than the number reported in the high-crime year of 1995.
The Harvard study also found that gun violence in the Windy City has disproportionately affected people of color. A staggering 56% of black respondents and 56% of Hispanic respondents had witnessed someone being shot, compared to 25% of whites.
Similarly, the data also found that Black and Hispanic respondents were more than twice as likely to have been a direct victim of gun violence by the time they turned 40. 7.4% of black respondents and 7.0% of Hispanic respondents had been shot, compared to 3.1% of whites.
Elsewhere, data found that men were 5 times more likely to be shot than women: 11% vs. 2%.
However, there was much less difference between the sexes in relation to the testimony of armed violence. 58% of the men surveyed had witnessed a shooting compared to 43% of the women surveyed.
Sampson and the other study authors say their analysis will help paint a clearer picture of gun crime in Chicago and the long-term impacts it has on communities.
“A broader focus beyond fatalities to include non-fatal gun injuries and witnessing incidents is critical to understanding the full health outcomes associated with gun violence,” they stated.