Social factors related to gun violence in urban United States

Introduction

Gun violence (GV), acknowledged as a public health crisis, disproportionately affects urban centers in the United States. However, the precise connections between social factors and GV are not fully understood. This study, leveraging the Cardiff Model approach, evaluates whether there is a statistical and geospatial relationship between social vulnerability index (SVI) and GV.

Methods

In this cross-sectional study, we combined Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a dataset of firearm violence (2019–2023), with corresponding census tract level SVIs for three selected cities—Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; and Washington, DC. The GVA was created, due to gaps in government-based data, from daily public records and media by an independent data collection group. Also, the SVI, derived from a place-based index from Centers for Disease Control (CDC), was originally used to evaluate the resiliency of communities to recover from socio-environmental stressors. GV data from these three cities, representative of major urban centers in the United States, were used to conduct various analyses. We used Poisson regression to assess whether nine of the sixteen SVI measures were statistically associated with GV incidents. Furthermore, we examined whether spatial relationships between SVI and GV differ by level of concentrated disadvantage in urban neighborhoods.

Results

Out of all GV incidents (10,442), corresponding to 488 census tracts, teenagers ages 12–17 were found to have higher GV rates in St. Louis (12 %) than Atlanta (7.6 %) and Washington DC (10.5 %). Children, ages 0–11, in St. Louis (3.1 %) were involved in more GV incidents than the other two (Washington DC-1.2 % and Atlanta-2.3 %) cities. In the composite model, census tract-level SVIs were statistically significantly associated with GV. Some of the most prominent SVIs, viewed as predictors of GV, included racial-ethnic minority [Incidence Rate Ratio (IRR): 1.02, 95 % CI: 1.01–1.02, p<0.001], 150 % of Federal Poverty Level (FPL) [IRR: 1.00, 95 % CI: 1.00–1.01, p<0.001], and unemployment (IRR: 1.01, p<0.001). Also, many of the SVI variables were found to be significantly associated with GV incidents in each of the three selected cities.

Conclusions

In this original study, we found that there was a strong statistically significant association between SVI-related disadvantaged neighborhoods and increased GV incidents. Additionally, we found that the geospatial distribution of GV incidents were more concentrated in neighborhoods with increased vulnerability throughout the three (Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; and Washington, DC) selected cities than those neighborhoods with decreased vulnerability. Unique approaches such as integration of the SVI with gun control legislation, which informs ownership, use, and access to firearms, provides a better strategy to inform the implementation of an interdisciplinary approach such as the Cardiff Model. GV policy reform, from the public health and criminology lens, would help reduce the prevalence of GV through the promotion of social resilience within communities.