Relationship Between Firearm-Related Deaths and Food Insecurity in Hampton Roads

The purpose of this paper was to examine the relationship between gun-related deaths and food insecurity in the Hampton Roads Metropolitan Area of Virginia. We utilized aggregated data from the publicly available Food Access Research Atlas data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine food access levels, and the Virginia Department of Health provided the gun death data. Using a Poisson regression model, we found that there is a statistically significant relationship between food insecurity and gun-related deaths in the Hampton Roads cities of Virginia Beach, Hampton, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Newport News and Norfolk. The model also revealed a significant relationship for age at death and city of residence with the sum of firearm-related mortalities. When studying the cities independently of each other, the cities with the most pronounced relationship between firearm-related mortalities and food insecurity were Chesapeake, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. We found a notable trend where the younger population, aged 17 to 25, experienced the highest rates of gun deaths in the metropolitan cities studied. Addressing food insecurity, as well as violence prevention for youth and young adults, may help to decrease the number of firearm-related fatalities in Hampton Roads.