Is gun violence in the US mostly limited to people involved in property/violent crime?

Question

This follows a question of mine on expatriates.SX:

I may move to the US, but I'm kind of scared of the gun violence

One of the answers there suggests that US gun violence is not as bad as the overall statistics make it look, because supposedly it's mostly confined to violence among "criminals".

Ignoring the problematics of that categorization (false dichotomy between criminals and "normal" people, committing a crime does not make that a defining feature of who a person is, criminal system bias against poorer and minority subjects etc.), suppose we define a "criminal otherwise than in an incident" as a person who has been convicted of a criminal offense such as: burglary, car theft, robbery, aggravated assault, extortion, homicide, manslaughter - at any time in his/her life, except for some specified incident.

Now, with that convoluted definition - how may gun violence incidents in the US were there, in any of the years 2010-2014:

• Overall (for normalization)?
• Which have had the gun used by a criminal other than in that incident?
• In which both most involved parties (e.g. perpatrator and victim) were criminals other than in that incident?

Notes:

• I know I'm being rather picky about the statistics here, so if you have a statistic which is close to what I'm after or can allow for a "guesstiamtion", that would help too.
• You can add some additional crimes in the same vein as those I listed (but please make that explicit).
• I haven't defined what a "gun violence incident" is. Let's say I'm interested both in incidents in which a gun was actually fired (intentionally or by accident), and incidents in which a gun was either fired or was used to threaten someone. But whatever definition your statistics use is fine.
• If you can separate out domestic (=intra-family) violence, that would be nice.

Answer 1

Yes. The research seems to support this assertion:

From Urban Wire's "What we know about gun violence in the United States: Who’s affected?":

A small set of key groups and a small number of repeat offenders are responsible for gun-related violence

...

Recent findings by our colleagues show that firearm violence is “driven by a tiny number of community members, many of them who are already known to the justice system, and who are also among the most likely victims of violence.” For example, Chicago data show that 41 percent of gun homicides in one high-crime community took place within the social network of less than 4 percent of that community’s population.

From the linked-above article "Engaging Communities in Reducing Gun Violence: A Road Map for Safer Communities":

5. A Small Numberof People Are Responsible for a Majority of Violent Incidents

While the impact of firearm violence is widespread and devastating, it is typically driven by a tiny number of community members, many of whom are already known to the justice system and who are also among the most likely victims of violence.

• Stockton Police Chief Eric Jones estimated that no more than 0.25 to 1 percent of the city’s population was actively involved in violence, and that about 83 percent of people in this small group were also involved with the justice system before committing a homicide.

• In Milwaukee, 91 percent of homicide suspects in 2014 had been previously arrested at least once (MHRC2014).

• Wider research on the dynamics of firearm violence supports these observations, finding that a small group of people with extensive criminal histories perpetrates the majority of violence (Braga 2003). Moreover, this violence is highly concentrated in small social networks (Tracey, Braga, and Papachristos 2016).

• In one Chicago neighborhood,41 percent of gun homicides occurred among a social network containing less than 4 percent of the neighborhood’s population (Papachristos and Wildeman 2014)

Answer 2

Any statistics on this matter are going to, almost by definition, by controversial and political. Check your sources carefully.

This article summarizes the 2014 CDC (a US government agency) statistics on gun violence in the US:

• 33,594: injuries from guns
• 21,386: suicides
• 11,008: homicides
• 275: undetermined or unintentional

To put those in some perspective, the actual CDC report itself does not list homicide in the top 15 causes of death in the US (suicide is #10).

Characterizing the nature of those homicides appears to be more difficult.

The above article contains some attempt to summarize, but if you want to dig into the grizzly details, you'll need to look at the FBI's statistics on homicide by relationship and statistics on homicide by method.

These stats are from 2011, so won't match the CDC figures above. A few key findings, with regard to your question (these percentages were calculated by me from the FBI figures provided):

• Only 11.7% of murders (not just those involving firearms) involve a stranger, although 44% are unhelpfully characterized as having an "unknown" relationship between victim and offender.
• 14% of murders occurred during the commission of other felonies (mostly robberies or drug-related offenses)
• 28% of murders occurred as part of arguments
• Only 5% of murders are characterized as gang-related

I'm not sure if or how much these figures put your mind to ease. These are national statistics, so will vary to an extremely large degree by location.

My primary advice is to look at the crime statistics for the specific area you are considering. These kinds of statistic are likely to be available from local or state government agencies, and widely reported by local newspapers.