New Orleans is 60 percent black and about 33 percent white. It’s a city of roughly 376,000 people. Virtually every fatal and nonfatal shooting this heavily black city is committed by a black individual. We now know the extent to which this relatively small mid-major city plays in contributing to the gun violence epidemic in America (ahem… black gun violence epidemic).
New Orleans mass shootings account for 5% of 2023 national total, according to researchers, by Jeff Adelson, NOLA.com, February 20, 2023
Attacks in New Orleans, including the one at the Bacchus parade on Sunday, account for nearly 5% of all the mass shootings tallied across the country this year, far outpacing any other city in the country, according to statistics compiled by a non-profit that researches gun violence.
The Bacchus shooting, which left one teenager dead and injured four other people, was the fourth mass shooting the city has seen this year.
That leaves New Orleans at the top of the list of the list for mass shootings. The city has seen more such incidents than have 43 states.
The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that tracks gun violence across the country using police and media reports and other sources, has tracked 82 mass shootings across the country since the start of 2023.
Like The Times-Picayune, the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are killed or injured, not including the shooter.
Five people have been killed and 14 more injured in mass shootings in New Orleans since the start of the year. They are among the 125 people who have been killed or injured by gunfire in the city during the timeframe, which works out to an average of more than two victims per day.
The overall number of shooting victims roughly matches the city’s pace at this point in 2022—a year that was one of the most violent on record in the city.
But mass shooting incidents have been far more common in the early months of 2023. There were 12 mass shootings in the city in all of 2022; if the current rate continues throughout the year, the city would experience 28 such events this year.
If New Orleans were 100 percent white, what percent of mass shootings would this hypothetical African-free city contribute the national total?
Seriously. What percent?
Asking for a friend.
