Illegal gun carrying in Chicago spiked in 2020 — and deadly violence followed
One of the most striking changes in crime in Chicago over the past year is something few people are talking about. It’s not the utterly tragic 55% increase in homicides in 2020 compared with 2019. It’s the nearly 110% increase in gun carrying, which itself is a major contributing factor to the rise in gun violence.
How do we know this? At the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, we have been examining data provided by the Chicago Police Department. There’s no measure of gun carrying, but we can draw an inference here by looking at two trends in CPD data that go in opposite directions. The first is that the number of police-resident encounters — at least as measured by street stops and traffic stops — plummeted in 2020 as the global COVID19 pandemic started. From January to April 2020 the number of stops dropped by 85%. Yet the number of illegal guns officers recovered during those encounters is actually up.
Unless the police have become dramatically better at figuring out who is illegally carrying a gun (and so have become better at figuring out who to stop), the implication is that lots more people are carrying guns illegally in Chicago. If we use this data as a proxy measure for illegal gun carrying, then as we can see gun carrying in 2020 is 108% higher than in 2019, and even 27% higher than in 2016 (the last time murders in our city increased so sharply).
This is a citywide phenomenon. We see massive increases in illegal gun carrying in literally every neighborhood in Chicago.
Why should we care?
Four of every five murders in Chicago are committed with guns. The vast majority of these murders occur in public places, and the majority of these murders stem from an altercation. Put differently: Most of the gun violence problem in Chicago occurs when two people have a confrontation in public and at least one of them is armed. These guns don’t cause violence, but they make violence more deadly than if people only had access to other weapons such as fists, knives, bats, etc.
We can see the relationship between gun carrying and gun violence in the data. During periods when gun carrying increases, gun violence increases shortly thereafter (and vice versa). Our gun violence problem is in part an illegal gun carrying problem.
Why is this happening?
Illegal gun carrying surged just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting. Gun carrying in January, February and March was very similar in 2019 and 2020, but then took off in April.
Since this is a criminal justice outcome, the criminal justice system will be the natural place many people will look first. And, as we saw in the first chart, the number of traffic and street stops made by police did indeed plummet as the pandemic started, for public safety reasons.
Almost every function of the justice system has been affected by the pandemic.
But there are reasons to think this isn’t only about the justice system.
The remarkable surge in gun carrying in 2020 is happening during an economic crisis that is of a scale we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. And that economic crisis is hitting young people the hardest. It is these young people — teenagers and young adults — who are the vast majority of those arrested for illegal gun possession, and are also at greatest risk for gun violence involvement as victims or offenders as well. Prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate for young people had been declining steadily, from nearly 15% at the start of 2014 down to closer to 5% by the end of 2019. The pandemic caused that unemployment rate to quintuple to 25%. This may be part of the cause of the rise in gun carrying.
Given the economic crisis we’re seeing among young people in America, it’s possibly no surprise that we’re also seeing a mental health crisis among young people — a hidden public health crisis behind the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a CDC survey conducted in the summer of 2020, three out of every four 18- to 24-year-olds in America reported they were experiencing some symptoms of anxiety, depression or trauma, or had increased their use of drugs and alcohol to deal with the stress of the pandemic. Fully one in four 18- to 24-year-olds said they seriously considered suicide the past 30 days.
Perhaps related to these economic and mental health crises, gun sales have surged in Illinois. The number of background checks for gun sales in the state increased by 51% in 2020 compared with 2019, noticeably higher than what we see for the nation as a whole. Applications for firearm owner’s ID cards in Illinois this year also are up, as the Tribune has reported. This is relevant not because lots of guns are sold within Chicago itself, but because far and away the most common source of guns that are used in Chicago crimes come from other parts of Illinois. Chicago might have some of the strictest gun regulations of anyplace in the country, but legal and illegal gun sales tend to track one another. We’re an island sitting within a sea of millions of easily transported handguns.
What should we do?
Chicago faces three challenges in solving this problem of illegal gun carrying.
The first is the deep dissatisfaction and distrust many people, particularly in communities of color, feel toward police and the broader criminal justice system. Until trust is restored, the solution to the illegal gun carrying problem won’t come from the criminal justice system.
The second challenge is how much of the supply of illegal guns is outside the city’s control. Most of the guns that flow into Chicago from elsewhere in Illinois or other states change hands in so-called secondary market sales that are basically unregulated under federal law. This is a major loophole the city itself can’t fix.
The third challenge is resources. There is growing evidence that we can reduce gun violence by investing in social programs that address root causes of violence. For example, in response to Chicago’s 2016 surge in gun violence, a partnership between Heartland Alliance and local NGOs like Centers for New Horizons, Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, Lawndale Christian Legal Center, North Lawndale Employment Network and UCAN launched the READI program to provide jobs and trauma-informed supports to young men. The University of Chicago is partnering to study the impacts, with initial results that are encouraging in terms of gun violence involvement. Similarly encouraging results come from a different program we’re studying for teenagers, the Choose 2 Change program run by Children’s Home & Aid and Youth Advocate Programs. But budget realities are tempering this promise. A social-policy response at the scale needed here needs a great deal more city, state and federal government help.
The data trends make clear the gun carrying problem is not going away on its own. The gun violence associated with illegal gun carrying is a threat to the long-term future of the city itself.
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Pritzker director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “Data Points” examines issues relevant to the Chicago area through data provided by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab.