A New Report on Gun Violence.

The Center for Gun Violence Solutions at The Johns Hopkins University has just released a detailed report on gun violence for 2022, based on the CDC’s release of relevant data for that year. The report illustrates the degree to which gun violence not only continues to be an endemic public health problem in the United States, but is also more concentrated in the younger population, particularly teen-age males, as well as a significant increase in youth suicide caused by the use of guns.

There also continues to be a significant disparity in gun violence rates between racial groups, with the black rate for gun homicide among children and teens registering at 18 times higher than the white rate for the same age group.

What follows are some rather critical comments about this report which I trust the research team at Hopkins will take in good faith. Indeed, I will forward my comments to them and if they choose to respond I will reprint their response without any editing of any kind.

My first issue with this report is that defining or quantifying gun violence by only counting shootings which results in a death is to create a complete lack of understanding the degree of gun violence in the United States. The reason that the authors have arbitrarily defined gun violence as only involving a fatality is because the CDC has stopped trying to come up…