Gun violence in the United States continued to decline significantly in 2024 — perhaps most pointedly in Philadelphia, where homicides fell more than 40 percent and shootings dropped to their lowest level in a decade. It’s a historic turnaround in a city in which, for two years in a row during the pandemic, gunfire claimed more than 500 lives annually.
These statistics should feel like welcome news, writes Philly engagement reporter Afea Tucker. But as the end of 2024 approached, the city experienced a particularly violent weekend — at least 25 people were shot, four fatally, over the course of three days — that served as a reminder that every shooting exacts a heavy toll. “Even as things began to feel less grim last year,” Tucker writes, “we are still in the thick of a national gun violence crisis.”
Andre Simms, the executive director of a local youth engagement organization, conveyed similar sentiments to The Philadelphia Inquirer. “We get into this mode of ‘Let’s celebrate, crime has dropped,’” Simms said, but “a lot of people died.” Shootings continue to disproportionately affect Black and brown communities, and the root causes of gun violence — covered in depth in Trace reporter Mensah M. Dean’s “Roots and Realities” series — endure.
“This is a generational fight,” Simms told the Inquirer. “We really got to attack the root causes.”
— Sunny Sone, senior editor
From The Trace
What More Can I Do?: Throughout 2024, I felt good about the steady decline of shootings in my home city of Philadelphia. That changed exactly 12 days before Christmas, when one of the most dangerous weekends of the year reminded me that gun violence remains an epidemic.
Gun Violence by the Numbers in 2024: As firearm sales have fallen, so have deaths and mass shootings. Trace reporter Chip Brownlee breaks down this year’s gun violence trends.
Roots and Realities: Centuries of discrimination against African Americans has contributed to what feels like a never-ending cycle of gun violence in Philadelphia, where Black people are dying at disproportionate rates to this day.
I Want to Change the Culture of Silence: From the Survivor Storytelling Network: This crisis has shattered so many families, including mine. If more people support survivors, we could begin to solve the problem.
Behind the Stories: NBC News4, Shootings Near Schools: In December, NBC News4 aired a segment about the toll of gun violence on Washington, D.C.’s youngest residents. This story is a collaboration with The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub.
What to Know Today
Five years ago, a confidential security report warned that New Orleans’ Bourbon Street tourist strip was vulnerable to two types of terror attacks: “vehicular ramming, and active shooting.” After a man in a pickup truck carried out both such attacks at once on New Year’s Day, killing 14 people and injuring dozens of others, city officials have been forced to confront whether they should have done more to protect the area. [The New York Times/The Times-Picayune]
Authorities identified the man who died at the scene of the Tesla Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas as a master sergeant in the U.S. Army’s elite Special Forces unit. They recovered two handguns at the scene, including a 50-caliber Desert Eagle and a semiautomatic pistol. Investigators say the body recovered from the vehicle sustained an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. [NBC News]
The New Year’s Day attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas, both of which involved guns, were each carried out by men with military backgrounds. The incidents fit a troubling pattern. [PBS News/The Intercept]
The ATF confirmed that Director Steven Dettelbach plans to step down effective January 18, just before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. His resignation comes after Trump promised to fire Dettelbach during his presidential campaign. Since taking office, Dettelbach has increased oversight of the firearms industry, much of it at Biden’s direction. [The Reload]
In Chicago, like in many big cities across the country, shootings and homicides declined in 2024. While it’s difficult to pinpoint exact causes for the drop, community-based violence prevention groups say they’ve seen progress over the past couple of years. But as federal grants issued during the COVID-19 pandemic for crime prevention run out, some of these organizations worry that their work may go unfunded, and their progress may be stalled. [Chicago Sun-Times]
On New Year’s Day, a shooter in Cetinje, Montenegro, killed 12 people in a gun rampage across several locations, shocking a country with widespread gun ownership but relatively few mass shootings. In the wake of the shooting, the National Security Council on Friday announced a strict new gun law and actions to confiscate illegal weapons. [The Washington Post/Associated Press]
Americans bought an estimated 1.24 million guns in December, according to an analysis of FBI data. That’s a 3 percent drop from November, and a 7 percent drop from December 2023. [The Trace]
Assistant engagement editor Victoria Clark wrote this section.
Data Point
1,081 — the number of shootings recorded by Philadelphia police in 2024. That’s the lowest total since 2014, and a decline of over 50 percent from the record violence from 2020 to 2022. [The Philadelphia Inquirer]
Non Sequitur
How to Disappear Completely
“The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?” [The Verge]
