The Color of Carnage: Race and Gun Violence in Chicago

Note: Because this blog post was originally written during my senior year of high school (in 2023), it is possible that some data contained in this post has been updated to reflect new developments. While I tried my best to find the MLA sources I originally used (some of which are in the original document), some may now be unavailable. I changed some details to reflect that. All of the research, however, sadly hasn't changed.

For the sake of consistency, I am hewing closely to the version that I originally wrote. This means that I will NOT update any data contained below. Outdated data will be marked with a ^.

The following content includes statistics about gun violence that some people might find traumatizing. Also, this content is not trying to put blame on specific people and isolate them; this is only for informational purposes.

For more information about what we can do to solve this problem, see this blog post. 

Gun violence is truly a uniquely American problem that is affecting cities across the country. More than 48,000 people die from it each year in the United States.* From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Rochester, New York to Cincinnati, Ohio, and even Chicago, Illinois, people everywhere are feeling the emotional remnants that this problem causes and are leading petitions to state and national governments to change relaxed, already existing gun laws. What’s more is that many important people have, over history, even been assassinated by guns, including Abraham Lincoln (assassinated on April 14, 1865*), Malcolm X (assassinated on February 21, 1965*), and Martin Luther King Jr. (assassinated on April 4, 1968*). However, what many people do not realize is that this problem affects black people and people with disadvantaged races more than it does white people and people with non-disadvantaged races.

According to Giffords, a gun control advocacy and research organization co-founded in 2013 by and named for former Arizona congresswoman and gun violence survivor Gabrielle Giffords, 1 in every 67 young Black men aged 18 to 24 were killed or injured by gun violence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2022. In Rochester, New York, it was 1 in every 50 young Black men of these ages (from that same year). In Cincinnati, Ohio, it was 1 in every 44 young Black men. But, this situation doesn’t just plague these cities of more than 100,000 people. In Chicago, African Americans make up 80% of the city’s shooting victims, while Latinos make up 17%, as compared to White people, who make up approximately 2% of the shooting victims (statistics provided by the City of Chicago, based on 2011-2018 Chicago Police Department data¹). Now, the question is: why is there such a high shooting rate percentage for African-Americans in the city of Chicago, and who is mainly causing the violence?

The main reason the shooting rate percentage for African Americans in Chicago is so high is that this city, like other cities in the United States (Philadelphia being one of them), has large, segregated Black communities with histories of disinvestment and dilapidation. This did not happen by chance or by nature, rather, it happened by how these communities were equipped to handle people of different races. As well as having a combination of disinvested public infrastructure and weak gun laws, they also lack equal access to safe housing and adequate educational and employment opportunities usually found in more sophisticated and wealthier neighborhoods. (Then-incoming mayor Brandon Johnson has identified this problem as one of the “root causes of crime” and has even said that his administration would target and attack this inequality.) On top of this, these neighborhoods are suffering from deindustrialization and discriminatory housing practices, so white flight from different neighborhoods at the same time that Black people are moving into these neighborhoods is causing people of this race to fall into poverty, further emphasizing and pronouncing the economic differences between Black and White people.

Now, since white men make up less of the shooting victims in the city of Chicago, one might assume that people of this race are committing most of the gun violence (however, data shows this is false). When faced with "poverty, unemployment, and single-parent households", they are more likely to commit homicide (which includes gun violence) and other violent crimes than a black man facing a similar set of problems. According to data published at Statista by Mother Jones, there have been 74^ documented mass shootings committed by white people between 1982 and 2023 (as of May 9, 2023). Most of these 74^ shootings took place in poor communities, where white people were exposed to risk factors for both committing the crime and being arrested. If these communities continue to be racially segregated and under-resourced by lacking equal access to safe housing and adequate educational and employment opportunities, then black people might be more likely to commit a shooting since they’re living in “such conditions of concentrated poverty.”

Gun violence doesn’t just affect Black people in poor communities, however. Police shootings of Black people have become increasingly and relatively commonplace, with 251 Black people shot to death by police officers in 2019 alone, according to data published at Statista by the Washington Post.* Furthermore, Black people are twice as likely as white people to be shot and killed by police officers, according to NBC News.* These disparities are not amplified because of more police contact between them and Black people or more violence in communities of color or a feeling of hatred and disgust toward Black people, rather, they are amplified by residential segregation (which is defined as “the spatial separation of two or more social groups within a specified geographic area") and the ensuing racial biases, which is a direct consequence of police officers working in low-income neighborhoods with relatively high levels of crime.² Those police officers will be exposed and subjected to more crimes, more use of force, and more shootings.² Residential segregation, specifically, plays a key role because of the way that police officers currently interact with predominantly black neighborhoods, according to Michael Siegel, a Boston University School of Public Health professor of community sciences. Furthermore, he says that training and interventions that aim to change the way that police officers interact with Black individuals should be replaced with training and interventions that aim to change the way that police officers interact with Black neighborhoods.

In conclusion, not only is race a contributing factor to gun violence in cities across the United States (especially Chicago), but the internal systemic structural standing (if there is equal access to safe housing or adequate educational and employment opportunities and if they invest enough in public infrastructure in addition to passing strong, common-sense gun laws that should keep these weapons of war out of the wrong persons’ hands) of the neighborhood/community in which they live in and the poverty concentration rate of that neighborhood/community can also determine whether underserved people are a victim of this uniquely American problem. In the coming years, training for police officers that primarily focuses on predominantly Black neighborhoods and improved infrastructure and systemic structure in those neighborhoods will be coming to cities across the country (especially Chicago) that can truly help the most vulnerable survive and live without the fear and threat of gun violence once and for all.

Additional Resources

Here is a video from CBS News explaining how race and economic inequality fuel the shootings that we have in Chicago, featuring the author of the Axios article, "The Deadliest City: Behind Chicago's Segregated Shooting Sprees."

Note: the video below is from August 2018 (as is the article), so some information contained in both might be outdated. Please be aware of this as you watch the video or read the article linked above.

*-denotes a source that was not part of the original MLA sources I used for this blog post.

^-This number has since been updated. To learn more, click here or read the information at the top of this post.

¹-Can be found on page 12 (PDF page 16).

²-Summarized from a comment on this article.