With more recent research drilling down on the precise relationship between temperature and crime rates, criminologists in the United States believe that gun violence in the country spikes during warm weather.
Highlighting the common sense as well as potentially less obvious mechanisms at play, David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told AFP, “It’s hard to shoot somebody if there’s nobody around.”
While there are many causes behind the rising tide of gun violence in the United States, a controversial idea is that hot weather might rev up conflict.
Hemenway, who co-wrote a paper in Injury Epidemiology, used reports from the Chicago Tribune to get the number of shootings per day and then matched those against daily high temperature, humidity, wind speed, the difference in temperature from historical average, and precipitation type and amount.
According to this report that examined the city of Chicago between 2012 and 2016, a 10-degree Celsius higher temperature was significantly associated with 34 percent more shootings on weekdays, and 42 percent more shootings on weekends or holidays.
“In the winter, there were more shootings on those days which wouldn’t have been hot in the summer but were warm for winter,” Hemenway said.
According to Hemenway, “It’s sort of a harm reduction. But even if this wasn’t a gun problem, I suspect we would find the same thing if we had evidence about fights and assaults. What the guns do is make hostile interactions more deadly.”
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Leah Schinasi of Drexel University-led research on another paper that looked at violent crime in Philadelphia and was published in the Journal of Urban Health in 2017.
Schinasi told AFP, “I live in Philadelphia, and I remember biking home from work on a very hot day and observing how cranky everyone seemed. I was interested to see if this observation translated to higher rates of crime on hot days.”
Violent crimes happened more often in the warmer months, May through September, according to Schinasi and the study’s co-author Ghassan Hamra.
In comparison, daily rates of violent crime reduced substantially in the colder months, October through April.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit research group, over 18,000 people have died from gun violence in the United States in 2022, including homicide and suicide.
(With inputs from agencies)
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