Stats Don’t Lie

Joe Loudon • COMBAT Communications Administrator

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2024

These are charts you don’t want your community—the county or state you call “home”—topping.

COMBAT has gathered “Just The Facts & The Stats,” and there is no denying the data:

• Our community has one of the country’s highest firearm homicide rates, based on deaths per 100,000 people.

• Our state and New Mexico share the unenviable status of being the only two states ranked among the nation’s “Top 10” in rates for 1.) firearm-related homicides, 2.) firearm-related suicides, and 3.) all firearm-related fatalities.

Jackson County and Missouri are too often listed near the top in these deadly categories—in a nation that averaged 48 firearm homicides every day between New Year’s Day 2018 and New Year’s Eve 2022.

Rather than focus on any one year, COMBAT utilized data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) to statistically portray the scope of the firearm fatality epidemic over a five-year span. The CDC tracks mortality figures for every county in the United States.

» CDC National Center for Health Statistics
Each official death certificate lists an “underlying cause of death” and the deceased person’s demographics. The CDC enters this information into its vast database.

Statistics do not tell the whole story or answer every question: "Why are there so many firearm homicides here?" But the stats don't lie. They clearly show that gun violence is prevalent—and that's just a fact—in Jackson County and Missouri.

JUST THE FACTS

→ Do the grim math: 48 per day, between 2018 and 2022, equates to one firearm homicide in the United States every half-an-hour for half a decade.

→ This around-the-clock bloodshed claimed 88,365 lives across the nation—a rate of 5.4 deaths per 100,000 people. Jackson County’s rate during the same 2018-22 span was more than four times higher.

→ Jackson County’s 22.4 rate paired with St. Louis City’s worst-in-the-nation 48.5 gave our state another unwanted distinction. Missouri and Louisiana were the only states in America with two “Top 10” counties for Highest Firearm Homicide Rates—among the 200-plus American counties, including the District of Columbia, that had populations surpassing 250,000 people.

→ St. Louis, as an independent city, operates its own administrative county offices, apart from St. Louis County. A 15.5 rate placed St. Louis County 17th on this Highest Firearm Homicide rate chart.

→ To put St. Louis City’s and Jackson County's rates in perspective consider how they compared globally. No nation had a higher "physical violence by firearm" death rate in 2021 than El Salvador's 40.9, according to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluations. The IHME analyzed stats from the United Nations' Office On Drugs & Crime, which excludes casualties from armed conflicts (i.e. international or civil wars) in its "intentional homicide" tabulations.

» Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluations

» United Nations Office On Drugs & Crime

→ In 2021 alone, Jackson County had a higher firearm homicide rate (23.3) than Mexico (22.6), and El Salvador's worst-in-the-world rate (40.9) was lower than St. Louis City's 49.4. Two other U.S. Counties with at least a quarter of million people also had higher rates in 2021 than El Salvador, a nation of 6.3 million people: Orleans Parish, Louisiana (46.4) and Baltimore City, Maryland (43.0).

JUST THE FACTS

→ Look at this chart showing how Jackson County’s firearm homicide rate compared to the largest counties in America—counties with populations ranging from Los Angeles County, California’s 9.7 million to Bexar County, Texas’ 2.1 million. Jackson County and Cook County, Illinois, were the only counties listed on this chart also on the chart above ranking the highest homicide rates for counties with 250,000 people or more.

→ “Why do we talk about Chicago so much?” Dr. Robert Winfield posed that question during a gun violence seminar the University of Kansas Medical Center held in 2019. The KU trauma surgeon stressed more focus probably needed to be on counties in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas that each had higher homicide rates in 2018 than Chicagoland’s Cook County.

» Trauma Surgeons Have Seen Gun Violence Up Close
May 22, 2019

→ What was true in 2018 remained true over the five-year span ending in 2022. During this half decade, the two metropolitan areas on opposite sides of Missouri each had firearm homicides rates much higher than Cook County.

→ Of the 16 U.S. counties with populations topping 2 million, eight had firearm homicide rates at or below the national 5.4 rate per 100,000 people (2018-22). That included New York City’s Kings (3.5) and Queens (1.8) counties.

→ With 165,746 residents, Wyandotte County didn’t have a high enough population to be included on the firearm homicide rate chart above. But its 21.1 rate paired with Jackson County’s 22.4 demonstrated how violence in the Kansas City area—like in St. Louis—crisscrosses state lines.

→ Chicago’s overall homicide rate fluctuated significantly from the North Side (3.2 deaths per 100,000) to the Windy City’s most violent West Side neighborhoods that had homicide rates of 115.2 and 146.8, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “How safe is Chicago?” the Crain’s Chicago Business report asked in 2022. “The answer depends on where [in Chicago] you are standing.”

» The Inequality Of Safety
Crain's Chicago Business · October 24, 2022

→ According to Statista, a data analytics company, no city in the world had a higher murder rate in 2023 than Colima, Mexico, at 140.3 per 100,000.

→ New York City’s crime rates increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, like in most other cities across the country and in other parts of the world. But those rates also were quickly trending downward, National Public Radio (NPR) pointed out in an early 2023 report. “Putting shooting and homicide crimes into context, we’re a much safer city than we were just 30 years ago,” Christopher Hermann, an assistant professor and criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told NPR. In 2022, 438 murders were committed in New York City—compared to almost 2,000 in 1993.

→ A 2023 academic study concluded "cities with a million or more people do have lower homicide rates than cities with half a million to a million.... Some of the largest cities [in the United States] are the safest." After analyzing data, much of it from the CDC, University of Illinois-Springfield researcher, Dr. Magic M. Wade, presented her findings in the scientific journal Homicide Studies and called for there to be more focus on mid-size and smaller cities: "Examining gun violence trends outside of the largest U.S. cities is imperative, since 42% of all firearm homicides occur in places with populations [less than] 250,000 and over two-thirds of peak violence cities have fewer than 100,000 residents.

» Homicide Studies
Wade, M. M. (2023). “Not as Bad as the ‘90s”? Firearm Violence in Small, Mid-Size, and Large US Cities, 2015–2021.

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