A friend in a liberal gun owners Facebook group asked the following question recently:

When did ‘Gun Violence’ become a common term? I find it curious that other forms of violence we talk about are not associated with the weapon like ‘Domestic Violence’, ‘Intimate Partner Violence’, ‘Gang Violence’…

Although it hardly constitutes lexical research, I like using the Google Ngram Viewer to get an initial sense of how the use of particular phrases has changed over time. Ngram searches Google’s database of books up to 2019. I’ve used it to look at “concealed carry” and “gun culture” previously.

Much like the phrase “mass shooting” belongs to the 21st century, it appears “gun violence” really emerged in the 1980s. There is an initial burst during the crack era crime increase (1980-1986), but the dramatic rise in gun-related crimes also likely had a lagged effect on the rise of public health scholarship on “gun violence.”

To wit: Kellermann and Reay published their case-control study of gunshot deaths in King County, Washington, in 1986, and in 1992 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) deepened its commitment to studying gun violence.

Zooming in just to look at the period from 1975-2019, we see some fluctuation in use of the phrase “gun violence” from its initial peak in the late 1990s. This perhaps reflects some regression to the mean or concern with other social issues like the Dot-com bubble bursting and 9/11.

We then observe steady growth from 2007 forward. This highlights the connection between mass public shootings — especially school shootings — and interest in “gun violence.”

This goes back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. The 1989 Stockton schoolyard and 1993 California Street shootings were precursors to the 1994 Assault Weapon ban. This connection is also evidenced in the peak in interest in “gun violence” in 1999 (Columbine) and the accelerated increase from 2007 (Virginia Tech) forward.

We can see this connection even more clearly if we use Google Trends, which highlights what terms are trending on Google Search, Google News, and YouTube. I’ve used it before to look at “concealed carry” over time.

Three major peaks in the topic “gun violence” are December 2012 (Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre), February 2018 (Parkland High School massacre), and May 2022 (Robb Elementary School massacre).

Clearly, trends in the use of the phrase “gun violence” are not perfectly correlated with underlying levels of gun violence, though interest in the phrase seems related to dramatic moments of public mass violence.

The steady rise in interest in “gun violence” from Sandy Hook forward is evidence that there has been some concerted effort to focus our attention on the issue. This is not surprising because sociologists who study social problems have long observed that CONDITIONS exist while PROBLEMS are constructed. Social problems like “gun violence” are constructed through complex social processes that typically involve concerted efforts (i.e., social movements). The rebranding of the gun control movement as the “gun violence prevention” movement is part of this process.

The social construction of “gun violence” as a social problem by public health scholars and activists seems clearly reflected in these data.