Story at a glance
- Results of a new national study found an association between hotter temperatures and increased gun violence in 100 U.S. cities.
- Findings indicate efforts to reduce the effects of heat on residents may also help curb gun violence.
- These interventions could include increasing tree coverage or installing cool pavements.
A new study on 100 cities across the United States linked higher temperatures with an increase in gun violence.
The study suggests that cities might want to look at ways to help people cool down, both to improve lives and to make urban areas safer from gun violence.
“Urban heat is predictable and, to some degree, modifiable,” the researchers wrote.
The study notes planting more trees and vegetation to provide more shade can help cool cities. Separately, the Environmental Protection Agency has suggested that cities install cooling pavement to cool urban environments — though the EPA recommendation was not linked to gun violence.
The idea that tempers rise and the risk of violence increases in summer months is nothing new, but the new study is the first time the issue has been closely analyzed on a national scale. In the past, research on the heat-violence association was confined to individual cities or regions.
The research found nearly 7 percent of all shootings in cities — 7,973 — came when temperatures were above average, even after adjusting for seasonal patterns.
Regions in the Northeast and Midwest saw the sharpest increases in firearm violence on days that were hotter than normal.
“Even though some regions showed larger or smaller effects, the general pattern is remarkably consistent across cities,” lead study author Jonathan Jay, an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, said in a statement.
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Warmer temperatures can increase stress hormones and raise the risk of individual violence, the authors explained, while people tend to spend more time outdoors in public places when temperatures rise, increasing the likelihood of conflict.
For the current study, researchers assessed 116,511 shootings that took place between 2015 and 2020.
Researchers stratified results based on temperature percentiles, meaning different temperatures had different effects on individual cities. For example, while Seattle, Wash. and Las Vegas, Nev. experience the highest elevated risk of shootings around the 96th temperature percentile, this corresponded to 84 °F in Seattle and 104 °F in Las Vegas.
The authors also wrote that a warming planet could lead to move gun violence by raising temperatures.
“Climate change, which may elevate daily temperatures above normal ranges, may contribute to increased firearm violence over time,” authors wrote.
Because communities of color experience a disproportionate exposure to urban heat, researchers suggest future studies into the heat-violence association aims at reducing both racial disparities in firearm violence and urban heat exposure.
“The Northeast and Midwest regions are where we see some of the starkest differences in the built environment and other resources, according to race — to me, these inequities are the most interesting and important direction of this work,” Jay said.
“We know that segregation and disinvestment lead communities of color, especially Black communities, to have greater exposure to adverse environmental conditions that contribute to gun violence risk, such as abandoned buildings, liquor stores, lack of green space, and more intense urban heat islands.”
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