Gun Homicide Research: What We Know and Where We Need to Go

• Author: Shani Buggs,April M. Zeoli
• Published date: 01 February 2022
• Date: 01 February 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10887679211048495
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/10887679211048495

Homicide Studies

2022, Vol. 26(1) 11 –26

© 2021 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/10887679211048495

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Special Issue Article

Gun Homicide Research:

What We Know and Where

We Need to Go

Shani Buggs1 and April M. Zeoli2

Abstract

Guns are used in the majority of homicides in the United States, making the problem

of homicide largely a problem of gun violence. This article presents three types of gun

homicide (mass shootings, intimate partner homicide, and community gun violence),

and briefly discusses the state of knowledge on their risk factors and promising

interventions. Future directions for research are presented, focusing on examining

differential implementation and impacts of interventions by racialized groups and

communities, as well as interrogating conventional approaches and methodologies.

Keywords

structural causes, gun policy, community-based violence, gun homicide, prevention

From 2010 through 2019, the homicide rate in the United States was 5.60 per 100,000

people. Seventy-two percent of these homicides were committed with guns (Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2021). While the United States continues

to be an outlier in gun-related deaths compared to other high-income nations, and the

gun death rate in the U.S. has increased while it has decreased in other countries

(Grinshteyn & Hemenway, 2019), research has illustrated wide intrastate and intra-

region variation in gun homicide rates within the U.S. (e.g., see Pear et al., 2018;

Walker et al., 2016). General population statistics, however, obscure the well-recog-

nized disparities in gun homicide rates that exist between demographic groups. There

are also relatively distinct types of gun homicide that have differing epidemiology,

including community gun violence, intimate partner homicide, and multiple-casualty

1University of California, Davis, CA, USA

2Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

April M. Zeoli, School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, 655 Auditorium Road, East Lansing,

MI 48103, USA.

Email: zeoli@msu.edu

1048495HSXXXX10.1177/10887679211048495Homicide StudiesBuggs and Zeoli

research-article2021

12 Homicide Studies 26(1)

(mass) shootings. These variations in gun homicide have motivated researchers to

examine place-based and structural factors that may contribute to the problem of

homicide, and to look to a wide range of interventions for its reduction. In this paper,

we will briefly discuss three types of gun homicide—mass shootings, intimate partner

homicides, and community gun violence—focusing on risk factors and interventions,

including those that are cross-cutting, and provide suggestions for future research

directions. We spend the bulk of the paper on community gun violence because it is the

most common type of gun homicide.

Gun Homicide Categories and Demographic Differences

The type of gun homicide that arguably garners the most attention and generates the

most widespread fear, despite making up a small percentage of gun homicide deaths,

is multiple-casualty, or mass, shootings. While criteria used to define a mass shooting

differ between data sources, a definition commonly used by researchers is the shooting

deaths of four or more individuals in one event (which could occur over several hours)

(Duwe, 2020). Using this definition, there has been an average of 22 mass shootings

per year from 2010 through 2018 (Duwe, 2020); however, the far-reaching impacts

and higher prevalence of shootings with multiple victims, regardless of lethality, may

be overlooked by focusing only on this category of multiple-casualty shootings.

The most common type of mass shooting involves the killing of family members,

including intimate partners (Fridel, 2021), with a greater percentage of cases involving

the killing of family members and/or a shooter with a history of domestic violence

(Geller et al., 2021; Zeoli & Paruk, 2020). Relatedly, when women are killed, they are

most often killed by their current or former intimate partners and the weapon most

often used is a gun (Fridel & Fox, 2019). Indeed, a violent male intimate partner’s

access to a gun increases the risk of homicide of the female partner by 400% (Campbell

et al., 2003). Interventions that reduce intimate partner homicide may have the poten-

tial to prevent some mass shootings (Zeoli & Paruk, 2020), but more research is needed

to determine this.

Community violence is a category of interpersonal violence that takes place in

public places between individuals who are not intimately related (The National Child

Traumatic Stress Network, 2019); thus, community gun violence is community vio-

lence committed with a gun. Most interpersonal gun homicides in the United States—

which have fluctuated but increased from 3.88 per 100,000 in 1999 to 4.38 per 100,000

in 2019 (CDC, 2021)—fall into this category.

Based on statistics from the (CDC) (2021), homicide was in the top five leading

causes of death for Americans aged 1 to 44 years old from 1999 to 2019. However, per

CDC data, it has been the number one cause of death for non-Hispanic Black males

aged 15 to 34 years since at least 1990, with over 85% of these homicides having been

committed with guns. While 15 to 34 years is a high-risk age group for homicide in

general, in 2019, the age-adjusted rate of homicide for non-Hispanic Black males of

all ages was almost 11 times higher than that of non-Hispanic White males (39.87 vs.

3.67 per 100,000, respectively) and the rate of gun homicide was over 14 times higher