Firearm homicide death rates have long been disproportionately higher for Black Americans compared to White Americans, and a new analysis across 45 years suggests that, in recent years, this disparity has grown. Alex Knorre of the University of South Florida, U.S., and John MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on February 25, 2026.
An abundance of prior research has firmly established that Black Americans face long-standing social and economic inequalities, including the Black-White racial disparity in firearm homicide deaths.
To help deepen understanding of this disparity, Knorre and MacDonald analyzed annual gun homicide and population data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiological Research. The dataset included a total of 607,315 deaths of Black and White victims of gun homicides in the U.S. between 1979 and 2023.
Statistical analysis of the data showed that, from 1988 to 2010, Black males faced an eight to nine times higher likelihood of firearm homicide death than White males. From 2010 to 2020, that disparity widened, with the rate of gun homicide for Black males 10.38 times higher than for White males in 2020. A slight decrease occurred between 2021 and 2023.
In 1979, the rate of gun homicide for Black females was 4.96 higher than for White females. This disparity then narrowed until 2017, but grew to 4.74 in 2020, with again a slight decrease between 2021 and 2023.
The researchers also calculated the yearly number of deaths of Black people attributable to the Black-White racial disparity. These add up to many thousands of Black lives lost, including 31,202 between 2021 and 2023 alone, the highest three years ever recorded.
This study underscores that Black Americans face disproportionately higher gun homicide death rates than White Americans, for both males and females, and that this persisted even during celebrated nationwide declines in homicides such as in the 1990s. Further research is needed to identify underlying causes of these disparities (while the Black population in the U.S. is known to experience disproportionately more concentrated disadvantage, the present study did not consider intersecting factors such as socioeconomic characteristics), evaluate efforts to reduce them, and address some of this study's limitations, such as by including other racial and ethnic groups.
The authors add: "Increases in firearm homicides since 2014 have effectively erased many of the gains achieved during the great homicide decline of the 1990s for Black Americans, resulting in thousands of preventable deaths. Most striking, from 2018 to 2023, there were more excess firearm homicides among Black Americans than during any comparable span since national records began in 1979."
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4rwa0ln
Citation: Knorre A, MacDonald J (2026) Unequal by the gun: Four decades of the Black-White firearm homicide gap. PLoS One 21(2): e0341645. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0341645
Author countries: U.S.
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
