Estimate: Gun Murders Up 31% in 2020 Over 2019
By Steve Sailer
01/20/2021
Earlier by Steve Sailer: ECONOMIST: America Is Experiencing the Worst Recorded Increase in Its National Murder Rate
From the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence from 7500 online sources, here is my version of their stats from the last two years:
| GUN VIOLENCE ARCHIVE | |||||
| PUBLISHED DATE: January 20, 2021 | 2019 | 2020 | Chg | Chg % | |
| Total Number of GV Deaths — ALL Causes | 39,525 | 43,465 | 3,940 | 10% | |
| Homicide/Murder/Unintentional/DGU | 15,435 | 19,309 | 3,874 | 25% | |
| Suicide | 24,090 | 24,156 | 66 | 0% | |
| Total Number of Injuries | 30,140 | 39,404 | 9,264 | 31% | |
| Mass Shootings | 417 | 612 | 195 | 47% | |
| Mass Murders | 31 | 20 | -11 | -35% | |
| Number of Children (age 0-11) | Killed | 209 | 293 | 84 | 40% |
| Injured | 486 | 696 | 210 | 43% | |
| Number of Teens (age 12-17) | Killed | 778 | 1,068 | 290 | 37% |
| Injured | 2,338 | 3,054 | 716 | 31% | |
| Officer Involved Incident-Officer Killed or Injured | Killed | 71 | 59 | -12 | -17% |
| Injured | 299 | 348 | 49 | 16% | |
| Officer Involved Incident-Subject-Suspect Killed or Injured | Killed | 1,286 | 1,288 | 2 | 0% |
| Injured | 792 | 941 | 149 | 19% | |
| Defensive Use | 1,595 | 1,432 | -163 | -10% | |
| Unintentional Shooting | 1,895 | 2,264 | 369 | 19% | |
| Murder/Suicides Incident | 632 | 574 | -58 | -9% |
If you take their row of “Homicide/Murder/Unintentional/DGU (Defensive Gun Use)” and subtract out their Unintentional Shooting and Defensive Use rows, I wind up with this estimate:
| iSteve estimate: | 2019 | 2020 | Chg | Chg % | |
| Homicide/Murder | 11,945 | 15,613 | 3,668 | 31% |
In early January, I looked through local newspaper accounts of 2020 in crime for 108 of the 200 largest cities and found murders in that sample (which accounted for 45% of national murders in 2019) up 38% over 2019. I figured the murder increase would be lower in smaller municipalities, so I estimated the national murder toll would be 25-30%. So I find 31% plausible.
If this increase in gun murders turns out to be real, I expect the 2020 increase in murders of all kinds to be a few percentage points lower. But that would likely still be twice the previous biggest increases in murders since 1960: 12.7% in 1968 and 12.1% in 2015 (the first BLM era).
How much we can trust this database, I couldn’t say. But it has been around for a number of years now, and the numbers don’t look obviously implausible.
By looking at which type of shootings went up in 2020, we can get a sense of who was doing the incremental shooting.
- Suicides, which tend to be a white thing, were unchanged from 2019.
- Mass murders with four or more killed by gunshot (sometimes Columbine-like, often with white or Asian shooters) dropped from 31 to 20.
- Mass shootings with four or more shot, whether killed or wounded (like on The Wire, usually black shooters firing at somebody they want to kill in a crowd at a social event), grew 47% from 417 to 612.
- Children killed were up 40%, and 12-17-year-old teens killed was up 37%. I associate both, especially child shootings, with black-on-black “gunplay” in which innocent bystanders get shot.
- Cops killed dropped from 71 to 59 (-17%), while cops injured grew 16%.
- Suspects shot dead by cops was unchanged at 1288, but suspects wounded by cops went up 19% to 941.
- Defensive use drop 10% to 1,432.
- Unintentional shootings went up 19% to 2,264, perhaps because of all the new gun buyers.
- Murder-suicide incidents (a generally white or Asian thing, often tied to domestic violence) dropped 9% to 574.
So, it sure sounds to me like the big growth in murders in 2020 was driven by more black shootings, typically of other blacks.