Tag Archive for: #gunviolence

City’s Public Safety Committee Meets Wednesday Afternoon To Discuss Gun Violence

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The Henderson City Council Public Safety Committee will meet Wednesday afternoon to discuss gun violence in the city.

The meeting will begin at 3 p.m. in City Council Chambers, 134 Rose Ave.

A recent analysis of firearm violence in rural, urban and suburban areas across the state conducted by the Governor’s Crime Commission’s Criminal Justice Analysis Center, has produced a list of findings that state and local leaders can use in their efforts to reduce gun violence.

  • Statewide increases in firearm homicide peaked in 2021 before declining 29% through June 2025. Nonfatal shootings followed similar trends.
  • Firearm suicide remains more prevalent than firearm homicide, with rates highest among older adults in rural counties.
  • Young adults from 20 to 24 years old face the highest rates of interpersonal firearm violence, with elevated risk also seen among populations from 15 to 19 years old and from 25 to 29 years old.
  • Black, non-Hispanic residents experience the highest rates of interpersonal firearm violence statewide, with rural Black communities facing the greatest burden. American Indian and Alaska Native non-Hispanic residents also experience disproportionately high risk of victimization, and Hispanic residents face higher risk in urban counties.
  • Rural counties reported the highest levels of firearm violence between 2020 and 2024, including homicide, suicide, nonfatal shootings and unintentional firearm deaths.
  • Urban counties matched rural counties in total firearm homicides over the five year period, recording far higher rates of other firearm crime and lower rates of firearm suicide.
  • Suburban counties reported the lowest levels of interpersonal firearm violence, though firearm suicide rates remained the second-highest behind rural counties.

“We now have a clearer picture of when, where and how firearm violence is occurring across North Carolina,” said Caroline Farmer, executive director of the Governor’s Crime Commission. “These findings inform state initiatives for grant funding, targeted prevention strategies and policies that address the growing firearm violence in rural areas across our state.”

Drawing on the most recent five years of available data, the analysis identifies trends in firearm homicide, nonfatal shootings, firearm suicide and other firearm-related harms. The findings highlight where prevention and policy efforts may have the strongest impact and illustrate how risk varies across age groups; racial and ethnic communities; and geographic regions.

 

Visit ncdps.gov/cjac to learn more.

TownTalk: Police Chief Barrow Discusses Gun Violence Resolution

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The increase in gun violence plaguing the country is something that Henderson Police Chief Marcus Barrow thinks a lot about, but he said he and his officers often are frustrated by the process to get offenders off the streets and successfully processed through the judicial system.

It’s illegal to discharge a firearm within the city limits, but that hasn’t done much to curtail the use of guns and shootings.

On Tuesday, the City Council adopted a resolution declaring gun violence a public health issue. One of the upsides of having this resolution in place, he said during Thursday’s TownTalk, is increased access to grant funding to combat a wide-ranging list of underlying issues that contribute to gun violence.

“We have a crisis and it’s a health crisis,” Barrow said. A mental health crisis, to be precise. He cited as an example that in a 12-month period, his officers were involved in 538 involuntary commitments. And that’s just for the city of Henderson – it doesn’t include numbers from the sheriff’s department.

Other underlying societal issues feed the problem, he said, from socio-economic issues to substance abuse. According to CDC statistics, men account for 87 percent of firearm deaths in the U.S. Firearm deaths are the leading cause of premature death, he said.

Councilwomen Melissa Elliott, founder of Gang Free, Inc. and Sara Coffey initiated the resolution, and Barrow said the audience present in Council Chambers on Tuesday applauded when the resolution passed.

“She did a great job with it,” Barrow said of Elliott’s work crafting the resolution. “She sees a problem and tries to address it.

Now it’s time for the community to address the problem, he said. “We need to get motivated behind this thing,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of the mindset that we’re going to arrest our way out of this.”

His department has secured various grant funding to help tackle the problem, and Barrow discussed one program that was able to go live in January 2022. The process took almost two years, but now his officers can enter data about shell casings into the database and within 24 to 48 hours, get results on whether the gun has been used in other crimes.

This is a great improvement on the six months’ to a year that it could take to get results from the SBI, Barrow said.

“I think we do a really good job here at the police department,” Barrow said. Currently, there are more than 1,800 firearms in the police evidence room. Federal indictments are on the increase in the past five years, but the backlog of cases in the court system means sometimes lengthy waits for convictions.

“We’re trying to do our part,” Barrow said, “keeping our finger stuck in the dam.”

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