Black and Hispanic people in Chicago exposed to gun violence at ‘significantly and persistently higher rate,’ report says

Nicole Chavez, CNN

Black and Hispanic people who grew up in Chicago were exposed to gun violence at a “significantly and persistently higher rate” by age 40 than their White counterparts, a new report shows.

The findings were published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open and stem from a survey that followed the lives of thousands of children in Chicago since the mid-1990s. In the new report, researchers examined the exposure that some of the survey’s participants had to gun violence from 1995 to 2021.

Researchers from Harvard University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford analyzed the answers of 2,418 participants – including Black, Hispanic and White people who were born in 1981, 1984 and 1996 – and found that witnessing or becoming a victim of gun violence varied by race or ethnicity and age.

By the time the participants turned 40, about 56% of Black respondents and nearly 55% of Latinos said they had seen someone else get shot, compared with nearly 26% of White respondents, the report says.

CNN has more details.

Members of the Black community have stepped up to help survivors of gun violence, whose trauma may never end.

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