Why Are Shootings Deadlier in Some Cities Than Others?

One thing the article didn&#x27;t mention which I&#x27;m curious about is the role of urban geography on shooting lethality.<p>For example, Chicago&#x27;s lethality rate is almost half of New Orleans (16.3% vs 27.9%). Having been to both cities, I&#x27;ve noticed that Chicago has remarkably long city blocks (1&#x2F;8th mile per block iirc), with wide sidewalks and numerous alleyways, and a very straight and regular grid in most of the South and West side sprawl. New Orleans trends towards the opposite (though it&#x27;s also much more varied than Chicago), with narrow sidewalks, lots of narrow one way streets, and irregular grid layouts. It&#x27;s easy to see how New Orlean&#x27;s geography could favor the attacker and lead to higher lethality. Would be interesting to see these geographic features quantified in some way.

One statistic I would like to see is the % of homicides that are <i>solved</i>. So many urban killings end up becoming cold cases because of the lack of witnesses.

It amazes me that we don&#x27;t have better data on something like this.

At first, I though maybe the data examined in the article might have some correlation with organized crime presence in the cities, but then I realized that if I were a professional assassin, I would probably never use a gun unless the client demanded it. I would almost certainly use automobile collisions in preference to almost everything else. And <i>then</i> I realized that most criminals are not clever enough to plan like that, and might just kick down a door, shoot someone, and run away during the emergency response window.<p>Shooters in Baltimore apparently invest more conscious effort in ensuring their targets are <i>dead</i> than other cities. A 10% higher lethality rate than other cities seems way too high to be explainable by accidental factors.

To get good data it either needs to be either indisputable or non-controversial. Murders (as a statstic) are controversial but indisputable.<p>But shootings are controversial and disputable. I suspect the numbers will be politicized and manipulated until they are no longer a good measure.

One other plausible explanation: the quality of trauma response protocols in different cities.

Shot placement? That and getting a .22LR in the hand is a little different than getting a 12ga slug to the head

I notice a correlation between the cities studied and race. I am surprised that this obvious variable was not taken into account.

Seems like there is quite a different racial makeup of those listed cities. Is that question permitted to be asked?