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While gun violence declined last year, a closer look at the data reveals a striking and surprising trend. While the total number of shootings is going down, the lethality of shootings — the odds of someone dying in a shooting — seems to be going up. If that trend holds, it could have massive consequences for gun violence in America, with hundreds or thousands more homicides per year.
A few years ago at a Chicago police station, one of us saw why this is happening. Officers who had stopped some teenagers in a car dropped on a desk what they had found during that stop: a semi-automatic pistol with a giant drum magazine appended to the bottom, which would allow the user to fire 100 rounds before reloading. That kind of alteration seems to be more common across the country and is leading to shootings becoming more deadly.
We can see the tragedies that result from data from Chicago over the past 13 years.
The number of high-capacity magazines, holding 15 or more rounds, that police recover on the streets has increased sixfold. That trend is interacting in an unhelpful way with the development of so-called Glock switches. One of the most effective gun laws in federal history came from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts in the 1930s to ban machine guns. What’s left on the market are semi-automatic firearms that fire once every time the trigger is pulled.
Glock switches are post-market devices that convert these guns into automatic firearms; that is, anyone with $50 and an internet connection can turn a regular semi-automatic firearm into a machine gun. While these were unheard of in 2010, last year, Chicago police seized 447 guns modified to fire fully automatically. From a public safety perspective, it’s not ideal for someone to be able to fire 100 rounds without having to reload; it’s even less ideal for those 100 rounds to be fired at a machine gun rate.
More high-capacity magazines and Glock switches have led the number of shell casings recovered at each shooting to surge. The number of shooting scenes in which police recovered 20 or more casings increased from 23 in 2010, less than 1% of total shooting incidents, to 386 last year — or nearly 16% of total shooting incidents.