Contextualizing Chicago's Enormous Drop in Shootings

When was the last time Chicago had this few shootings?

Chicago has experienced a remarkable drop in gun violence so far in 2025 though the aggregate number — more than 1,200 shooting victims as of this writing — highlights the scale of continued trauma for far too many Americans. Yet it's also important to recognize the degree of the decline, including the likelihood that Chicago has seen fewer shootings victims so far this year than any year since the mid-1960s.

The City of Chicago has a solid dashboard and dataset providing victim-level shooting data. These tools can help to reconstruct shooting trends over the last quarter century.

Taken as a whole, the available evidence suggests that Chicago has seen fewer shootings so far this year than any year since the mid-1960s. Acknowledging a modern low so far this year in Chicago does not mean the problem is no longer serious or is solved, but one can still appreciate a positive development that should be understood and learned from to enhance future policy efforts.

There were nearly 5,000 people shot in Chicago in 2021, a roughly 70 percent increase relative to 2019’s pre-surge level. Gun violence fell a good bit between 2021 and 2023, largely plauteaud in 2024, and has been plunging in 2025. Here’s how shooting victimization looks when graphed rolling over 365 days through late August:

The 1,264 people shot in Chicago through August 30 this year signifies far, far too many lives impacted by gun violence, but that figure is down 37 percent through this point last year and down nearly 60 percent from this point in 2021.

The trend to this point in the year is encouraging, though since we don’t fully understand why this drop is occurring in Chicago (and elsewhere), it’s impossible to say whether the trend will continue, accelerate, or reverse in the coming months or years. But that does not make the trend so far any less encouraging.

Showing the drop in gun violence this year is relatively straightforward, yet I want to know when was the last time has had this few shooting victims at this point in the year. The city’s shooting dashboard goes through 2010 and I don’t believe there’s any publication of older shooting victim data in Chicago (I’d love to be wrong about that).

The dashboard may only go back to 2010 but the city has a dataset of incidents that goes back to 2001 that can help answer when the last time Chicago had this few shootings in a year. The incident-level data does not specifically identify shootings, but the number of shooting victims in a year can be pretty closely derived by combining the number of homicides with the number of aggravated batteries with a handgun or other firearm — which largely equates to non-fatal shooting incidents.

Comparing the incident-level data to the known shooting data between 2010 and 2025 shows this methodology to be really good at essentially telling us the number of shooting victims in a given year.

The incident-level data back to 2001 provides extremely strong evidence that this year through July featured the fewest shooting incidents of any year going back to at least 2001. This is just an informed guess though as it’s not fully clear that CPD’s incident-level data corresponds exactly with non-fatal shootings prior to 2010 since they weren’t kept (note: I stopped in July since the incident data has more of a delay than the shooting data).

But what about going back even more? There may not be firmer CPD data specifically on shootings, but we do have the number of murder victims in Chicago each year dating back to 1961 as reported to the FBI.

Chicago is on pace for just over 400 murders in 2025 which could be the fewest murders there since 1965. Obviously, there’s a lot of time left in the year, but Chicago will almost certainly have way fewer murders in 2025 than it did in any year between 1966 and the early 2000s.

Chicago may have had the fewest shootings in decades so far this year, but there were fewer murders in 2014. This can be attributed to increasing evidence that shootings have become more deadly in Chicago over the last 15 to 20 years. Looking at Chicago’s shooting data you see that around 12 percent of shooting victims died in 2010 compared to nearly 18 percent so far in 2025.

Medical technologies for treating gunshot wounds have undoubtedly come a long way over the last 25 to 30 years, but — as Jens Ludwig argues — these gains may be offset by the proliferation of more higher capacity firearms.

Were shootings more deadly in 1990 than they are today? The trend over the last 15 years suggests the opposite may be the case, but it’s hard to say for sure since we don’t have shooting data for the 1990s.

Still, there were 783 murders per year in Chicago on average between 1968 and 2000, far higher than 400 or so the city is on pace for this year. Given just how many more murders there were those years compared to 2025, it stands to reason that the number of shooting victims were also substantially higher those years even though we don’t have data for them.

This is a roundabout approach with a decent number of assumptions. There have been fewer shootings in Chicago so far this year than in any of the last 15 years per the available data. The finding is also likely true extending out to 2001 based on the incident-level data.

Chicago, like many American cities, still has far too much gun violence, presenting a persistent problem in need of continued attention and innovative solutions. At the same time, given how many more murders there were in the 70s, 80s and 90s than today, it stands to reason that Chicago has likely had fewer shootings this year than any year since 1965 or 1966.