|
Abstract
|
The study of historical policies shaping racial and economic neighborhood segregation and their link to violence in U.S. cities has long engaged historians and sociologists. The recent rise of such research published in top biomedical journals, such as Annals of Internal Medicine, signals an important and growing commitment from within medicine to understand and address health from its social and structural origins.
In their article, Dholakia and colleagues (1) extend the precision and scope through which prior studies have supported the conclusion that historical 1930s-era "redlining" maps created by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) illustrate spatial associations with contemporary nonsuicide firearm violence. They find that, in comparison with areas depicted in over 200 city maps deemed more "hazardous" for federally backed mortgage lending (primarily due to the race, ethnicity, and poverty of residents of those urban spaces), areas deemed more advantageous (de facto Whiter and wealthier) are associated with a dose-response reduction in the incidence of nonsuicide firearm fatalities between 2014 and 2022. The authors conclude that there is heterogeneity in this finding across U.S. cities and that more research is needed to understand what underlies intercity differences.
Dholakia and colleagues capitalize on 2 advances in data availability required for research of this kind. First, the Mapping Inequality project has established a public repository containing educational resources about the legacy of racially biased steering in the housing sector and its effects on urban life (2). The project also digitized HOLC maps, making archived images and spatial data accessible for research and prompting numerous studies comparing HOLC areas with health outcomes, including firearm violence. Second, the authors draw on the Gun Violence Archive, the only up-to-date public national database of fatal and nonfatal U.S. gun violence events, culled from thousands of media, law enforcement, government, and commercial sources since 2013 (3). Although any claims about the accuracy of the Gun Violence Archive in delineating point locations of firearm fatalities at a national scale should not be overstated, its sensitivity and specificity have advanced in more recent years...
Language: en |