The Heat Is Killing Us: Climate Change and Rising Temps Are Increasing Gun Violence

By Helina Selemon, New York Amsterdam News

As our planet grapples with the consequences of man-made climate change and the excessive summer heat it is causing, a lesser-known repercussion is coming to light: its correlation with the uptick in gun-related incidents in America’s cities. But how exactly are rising temperatures and gun violence intertwined, and could addressing the effects of climate change in cities hold the key to curbing this alarming trend?

Near the end of July 2022, the city was in a heat wave. On Tuesday, July 19, a series of oppressively hot 90-degree days began with the humidity hovering above 70% in some places. The air was thick and heavy, the kind of heat that sent streams of sweat down your spine in minutes and made clothes cling to skin like a damp blanket. On some days, the air barely felt like it was moving. 

In Central Park that Wednesday, it was 95 degrees. In Tremont and Brownsville, it was about 100 and felt like 105 degrees. In that week and before the following Tuesday was done, shots rang out in 47 different places in the city, leaving six people dead.

According to a recent study by researchers at the University of Washington and Boston University looking at heat and shootings in 100 U.S. cities from 2015 to 2020, nearly 7% of gun violence incidents could be directly attributed to above-average seasonal temperatures. In New York City, that percentage doubles to around 15%.

That means that in New York in 2020, a pandemic year with the highest number of shooting incidents in the city’s recent history, an estimated 286 shooting incidents wouldn’t have occurred if it wasn’t exceptionally hot outside, according to the researchers. That’s one of the highest of the 100 cities studied, said Jonathan Jay, a Boston University researcher and a co-author of the paper.

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This is not just about understanding the weather: it’s about how heat exacerbates existing social and environmental disparities. Jay said that daily heat puts further stress on Black and brown communities that are disproportionately impacted by climate change and gun violence. Many of these communities reside in urban heat islands—cities and neighborhoods that trap heat because buildings and dark asphalt roads are reflecting heat and have too little foliage and green space to absorb it. 

“The motivation [of the study] was… to understand heat exposure as one of the factors in the physical environment that influence the social environment in ways that produce these huge inequities and gun violence exposure,” he added. 

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