The nature of violence: exploring how community and incident characteristics influence the likelihood that gun crimes become multi-victim events

Gun crime continues to represent a substantial threat to public safety in the United States. Firearms are disproportionately involved in most crimes of violence, particularly murder (Collins et al., 2017; Cook & Pollack, 2017; Goldsmith et al., 2022; Johnson et al., 2021), and firearm-related offending is more pronounced in the U.S. than any other industrialized nation (Carson et al., 2022). A large body of literature has examined the extent to which characteristics of communities, place, victims, and offenders contribute to the likelihood and frequency of gun violence. Yet the vast majority of these works have restricted their analyses to single-offender, single-victim cases, effectively inhibiting our understanding of the factors that contribute to the likelihood that gun crimes become multi-victim events. I address this gap in the literature through application of binary logistic regression to 1,291 shootings that occurred in the city of Chattanooga between 1/1/13 and 12/30/24.