CDC official advocates planting trees as a solution to curtail gun violence

A new CDC report published on Tuesday warns that firearm homicides spiked in 2020 to their highest levels since 1994. But media chatter about this report has added that trees help curtail the violence.

(Click here to read the CDC’s firearm homicide and suicide rates report.)

"We've also funded research around greening initiatives to where you can go in and make a vacant lot look better by planting grass and trees. That's been shown to reduce firearm assaults by up to 29% in impoverished areas" says Dr. Debra Houry, acting principal deputy director and head of the National Center for Injury Prevention, which works under the CDC.

In the CNN report which quotes her, their article introduces Houry as having a bloody history with gun violence earlier in her career as a physician.

To back up her point about beautification of vacant lots in urban areas, they link to a 2018 UPenn study.

"Neighborhoods where vacant lots were cleaned up experienced a 29 percent reduction in gun violence, 22 percent decrease in burglaries, and 30 percent drop in nuisances like noise complaints and illegal dumping," the study claims. Their conclusions amount to how environmental surroundings play a role in improving social cohesion.

The study involved researchers being randomly assigned 541 different lots which then received either significant renovations, minor touch-ups, or no revamping at all (the control group).  

Paper author John MacDonald was impressed with how the findings established a "substantial reduction in crime" as a result of the research. "Particularly, a large reduction in gun assaults in neighborhoods that were in the lower 50 percent of income distribution in Philadelphia."

As for the latest May 2022 gun report, the researchers in the CDC findings say that 2020's COVID pandemic accelerated firearm homicide 4.5 times higher, and gun suicides by 1.3 times as much in poorer neighborhoods, when compared with their upper-class counterparts. That was a sticking point for Dr. Houry. "If we're going to look at where to intervene, it's in a lot of these impoverished communities," she told CNN.

The jump in overall homicide rates on a year by year basis was 34.6 percent per 100,000 persons, between 2019 and 2020. The CDC report further says that 79 percent of homicides and 53 percent of suicides involved guns.

Last Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced an Office of Environmental Justice within the DOJ to address some of the aforementioned points.

"Although violations of our environmental laws can happen anywhere, communities of color, indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change," Garland said.