The roots of the gun-research problem go back nearly 100 years. In 1929, when federal law-enforcement officials unveiled the countrys first standardized method of tracking crimes, they divided assaults into just two categories in the inaugural Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook: simple (usually a misdemeanor) and aggravated (often a felony).
Serious urban crime plagued cities, but it was a wholly different time. On the one hand, it was the year of the Saint Valentines Day Massacre in Chicago, when gangsters associated with Al Capone killed seven men, five of whom were members of a rival gang; on the other hand, the UCR handbook explained that shooting at or into trains should not count as a violent crime because they are usually offenses of malicious mischief by children.
Because of the widespread adoption of the UCRs criteria, police departments to this day fail to report shootings as separate, countable crime statistics; instead, an unknown number of shootings are lumped in with all the other aggravated assaults, like stabbings, pool-cue beatings, or attacks with a bat.
The shooting data has been problematic from the start, and thats because of this aggravated-assault category, Lauritsen said. That legacy has been around for 90 years.
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The case information collected by hospitals is not typically coded for any connections to the case information collected by law enforcement, so its almost impossible to match victims to any arrested perpetrators or seized firearms, which would yield a trove of useful datacriminal histories, relationships between victims and shooters, socioeconomic status, weapon types. Some police departments do carefully track shootings, but most keep that data internal.
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But other cities cant tell you how many people are shot in their own jurisdictions, said David Kennedy, the director of the National Network for Safe Communities at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. That includes many of the biggest cities in the country.
