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# What Data Can’t Tell Us
- URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/crime-data-gaps-women-firearms/
- Published: 2026-09-09T13:22:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-09T13:22:34.000Z
- Description: Gaps in the knowledge base on women and firearms
- Author: Jeff Asher
- Tags: #women-and-guns, Gun Violence, What We Know and Don't Know, Crime

Crime data questions are typically much easier to ask than to answer. 

We know how many NFL games were played last season, how many jobs the U.S. economy created last month and the average price of gas in every county in the United States yesterday. Writing about trends in women’s gun deaths and, specifically, domestic violence, seems like it should be straightforward from a data perspective.

But we won’t have a formal estimate from the FBI of how many murders there were in the United States in 2025 until 2026 is well past the halfway mark, and even then those initial estimates may be revised upward in 2027 based on the FBI’s habit of doing just that in recent years. 

The task of evaluating the trend of women’s gun homicides, therefore, is nowhere near as straightforward as it should be. We should be able to understand these trends as they stand now and place them in proper historical context — but can we?

There are a few conclusions we can draw from the available data.

First, homicides — and especially firearm homicides — spiked for both women and men in 2020 and have been falling at a historic pace over the last few years. The data show that women are far more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner or another family member. The number of women killed by an intimate partner or family member has been steady for most of the last 30 years, suggesting that the recent surge and subsequent drop in firearm homicides with women victims is largely driven by community or street violence rather than domestic violence.

Finally, the data show that firearms are increasingly used in killings of women. Fewer women are being murdered in the U.S., but the number of firearm homicides is shrinking much more slowly than the more rapidly falling pace of nonfirearm homicides. The share of male homicides involving a firearm, by contrast, has shrunk each year since 2021, per FBI data. 

### The data challenge

Responsibly analyzing crime trends usually first calls for evaluating the data landscape. 

The FBI’s formal 2025 crime estimates won’t be released until the second half of 2026, but there are alternative sources. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publishes monthly homicide data much faster than the FBI, and many police departments publish aggregated crime counts or raw incident-level offense data. States like Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois publish agency-level data nearly as quickly as it comes in. 

Last year, the FBI started publishing monthly crime data for more than 10,000 agencies that participate in the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) program. NIBRS was designed in the 1980s to provide far more information on individual crime incidents than was reported under the FBI’s old system. 

Critically, NIBRS has also forced the creation of critical infrastructure for fast — in some cases daily — reporting from agencies to states to the FBI. The result is monthly reporting of crime data that previously took a year or more to make their way to the public.

Combining the FBI’s monthly data with reporting from other sources such as the [Gun Violence Archive](https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), [the CDC](https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd-icd10-provisional.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org), local law enforcement and state agencies means we can describe crime trends with unprecedented accuracy and speed. This is true of all crimes but is especially true of murder, which has richer reporting from more data sources. A year’s crime trends are known in intricate detail even before the year is over. 

But there are still myriad challenges in analyzing crime and gun violence data in the United States. 

The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) has data available through 2025, but some states do not regularly participate (most notably Florida), making it somewhat challenging to use for analysis. Additionally, reporting was incomplete in 2021, when the FBI was transitioning to the new NIBRS program, and substantially fewer law enforcement agencies submitted data. 

SHR can help answer the trends in much more detail than the CDC’s data can, but it still cannot answer difficult questions with precision. It is necessary, therefore, to combine the two to get a bigger-picture view of trends over time. 

### What the data tell us

In 2025, murder fell at the fastest pace ever recorded in the United States, with the country seeing the lowest murder rate since the FBI began collecting national data in 1960\. The near-miraculous drop in murder over the last four years has disproportionately affected men more than women. More women were killed with a gun in 2025 than were killed in 2019, while far fewer men were killed with a firearm in 2025 than in prepandemic years. 

The homicide rate rose enormously for both men and women in 2020, though it rose faster for men than women — roughly a 30% increase for men versus 20% for women in both the FBI and CDC data collections. In contrast, but likely relatedly, homicide rates have fallen faster for men than women in each of the last three years, including a 21% drop for men compared with a 14% drop for women in 2025 in the FBI’s data.

Firearms are used far more often in homicides today than they were 25 years ago, a fact that is true both for male and female homicide victims. The share of people killed in firearm (versus nonfirearm) homicides has increased in both the FBI and CDC data since 2000, and it has increased more for women than men. 

At the turn of the 21st century, more than 70% of male homicide victims were killed with a firearm, compared with less than half of female victims. The gap has shrunk considerably over the last few years as guns have become the primary weapon in a far greater share of homicides where a woman was killed. According to FBI data, as recently as 2018, around half of all women killed in a homicide were killed by a firearm, but that share has jumped to more than 60% of women killed in homicides since 2020\. 

The number of women murdered via firearm rose more than 60% in the FBI’s data between 2019 and 2022 compared with an 11% increase in nonfirearm murders. Homicides have fallen enormously for both men and women since peaking in 2022, but roughly as many women were still killed with a gun in a homicide in 2025 as in 2019\. 

More women being killed by firearms than nonfirearms is an unfortunate new trend. There was never a year between 1976 and 2019 with 500 more women killed via firearm than other means, but that has happened in the FBI’s data every year since 2020.

### Homicide relationships 

Women are far more likely than men to be killed in intimate partner violence, but the deeper you dig — analytically speaking — the more careful you must be about potential incompleteness of data reporting. 

The FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report does capture the relationship status between a victim and offender and has reasonably well-reported data going back to 1976, but the relationship is often marked as “unknown” for more than 40% of all homicide victims each year. 

The difference in relationship types between the genders provides a clue as to the ways victimization differs between men and women. More than half of men who were murdered between 2020 and 2025 had an unknown relationship with their assailant compared with 30% of women. While we can’t be entirely sure why this discrepancy exists, it seems most likely because intimate partner violence — where a victim undoubtedly knows their offender — accounts for a larger share of female than male homicides. 

Women are far more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner — defined here as any homicide where the victim’s relationship to the offender was identified by law enforcement as a spouse, ex-spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend. Intimate partners make up the most common relationship type for female firearm homicide victims. Intimate partner violence accounts for roughly half of all such victims where the relationship was identified in the FBI data. 

Men, by contrast, are far more likely to be killed by a non-family member or stranger, according to the FBI’s data. In 2025, according to data where the relationship to the victim was known, more than 82% of reported male firearm homicide victims were killed by someone with a nonfamilial relationship or a stranger, compared with 36% for women. Less than 5% of male firearm homicide incidents involved intimate partner violence. 

The share of women killed with an “unknown” relationship to their killer spiked in the aftermath of COVID-19 before dropping fast since 2023\. This suggests, though by no means provides conclusive proof, that much of the rise in women being killed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent plunge over the last few years, were driven by community violence — [defined by the CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/community-violence/about/index.html?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) as violence that occurs between unrelated individuals outside of the home — rather than domestic violence. Community violence is more random and seemingly less likely to have an identified perpetrator than family-driven violence. 

Crime data are far from perfect, but the available data paint a clear picture of what is happening even if they do not shed light on why. Gun homicides of both men and women surged in 2020, though they have come down more for men than women in the years since. While the number of women killed in community violence spiked during the height of the pandemic and has come down in the years since, the number of women killed in domestic violence — especially via firearm — remains stubbornly high. 

One way to improve our understanding of how gun violence affects women in the U.S. would be through better publishing of agency-level shooting data. A handful of cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, publish regularly updated victim-level data on shootings, which allows for real-time evaluation of changing trends. But these cities are few and far between. 

Still, the gap between certainty and uncertainty is shrinking as data become more available. Hopefully, better data can spur a better understanding of what is driving all gun violence down and what can be done to continue these downward trends.