The Black-White Gun Homicide Gap Widened to Its Largest Point on Record Between 2018-2023

The racial disparity in gun homicide deaths in the United States has been documented for decades. What a 45-year analysis of federal mortality data now makes clear is that the disparity has not remained stable - it has grown, and the period from 2018 to 2023 produced the highest concentration of excess Black deaths from gun homicide since national records began in 1979.

Alex Knorre of the University of South Florida and John MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 607,315 deaths of Black and White gun homicide victims recorded in the CDC's Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiological Research database between 1979 and 2023. Their findings, published in PLOS ONE, trace the trajectory of racial disparity across the entire dataset, including through the crime decline of the 1990s, the post-2014 rise in homicides, and the pandemic-era spike.

The Numbers Behind the Gap

From 1988 to 2010, Black males faced an 8 to 9 times higher likelihood of firearm homicide death than White males - already a profound disparity, but one that held relatively steady across more than two decades. Beginning around 2010, the gap widened. By 2020, the firearm homicide rate for Black males was 10.38 times higher than for White males - the highest ratio recorded in the dataset. A modest decrease occurred between 2021 and 2023, but rates remained far above their pre-2010 levels.

For Black females, the pattern differs in scale but tracks a similar direction. In 1979, the gun homicide rate for Black females was 4.96 times higher than for White females. That disparity narrowed through 2017, then widened again to 4.74 in 2020 before a slight decrease.

The researchers also calculated excess deaths - the number of Black Americans killed above what would be expected if their homicide rate matched the White rate. These figures accumulate to a significant mortality burden: 31,202 excess Black deaths from gun homicide in just the three years from 2021 to 2023, the highest three-year total ever recorded in the dataset.

What Drives Disparity: Structural Inequality, Not Simple Demography

As the Black population in the U.S. has grown, one might expect some increase in absolute numbers of Black homicide deaths even if rates remained stable. The statistical analysis in this study controlled for population size, isolating the disparity signal from demographic trends. The disparity widened even after this adjustment, particularly during the post-2014 homicide rise.

The study is explicit about its limitations: it did not examine the socioeconomic, geographic, or policy factors that drive these disparities. The Black population in the U.S. disproportionately experiences concentrated disadvantage - higher poverty rates, greater exposure to under-resourced neighborhoods, and unequal access to institutions that might reduce violence. These structural conditions are well-documented correlates of homicide risk, but separating their relative contributions falls outside the scope of a mortality-data analysis.

The Scope of What Was Lost

"Increases in firearm homicides since 2014 have effectively erased many of the gains achieved during the great homicide decline of the 1990s for Black Americans, resulting in thousands of preventable deaths," the authors write. "Most striking, from 2018 to 2023, there were more excess firearm homicides among Black Americans than during any comparable span since national records began in 1979."

The decline in violent crime during the 1990s was real and widely documented - but for Black Americans, the net effect of subsequent increases wiped out much of that progress. The disparity was not eliminated during the crime decline; it narrowed somewhat, then expanded again with the post-2014 rise, compounding the historical gap rather than closing it. No specific funding was received for this work.