Over the last year and change, we’ve had a problem with homicides in this country. They’re skyrocketing and politicians are desperate to try and find a solution. People don’t like seeing news reports of people being murdered, after all.

However, in Indianapolis, someone took a look at homicides in the city from before the surge and found something interesting.

It seems most of the people involved weren’t exactly strangers to law enforcement.

A recent review of Indianapolis’ violence issues, specifically involving guns, from March 2018 to February 2020 found around 75% of people had multiple arrests before the homicide. IMPD said on average, both suspects and victims had more than 5 prior arrests.

“The suspects, on average, were arrested at least seven times by the time of the homicide incident,” Allison Davids, Intelligence Analyst at the Crime Gun Intelligence Center, said.

The report by the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform also said at least 39% of homicides involve a group of three or more people committing violence. In these homicides, they are either the victim, suspect or both.

Now, there are some interesting things we can learn from this.

First, of course, is that most violent crimes are committed by a handful of people within a community. This isn’t some epidemic where just everyone is shooting everyone else. It’s a specific group of people that are causing most of the problems.

Another thing we can surmise is that with this many arrests, there’s a good chance these people are convicted felons long before they commit a homicide. If that’s so, where did they get the gun? Remember, this specifically looks at gun homicides, so how did they get the? It sure as hell wasn’t from a licensed gun dealer. They couldn’t pass the background check.

In other words, they got the gun from the black market.

Somehow, I don’t think additional gun control measures are really going to stop that. Black market gun dealers aren’t known for their adherence to current gun control laws, for some silly reason.

Of course, this is just Indianapolis, but I think you’ll find something similar in every community. Maybe not the exact percentage–some may be higher, some may be lower–but close enough to illustrate some of these key facts.

It should also be enough to know that programs that target these individuals and tries to pull them off this particular path in life may well yield some pretty good results in lowering the homicide rate.

Or, some can keep demanding gun control regardless of what data we have suggesting the problem has nothing to do with how easy it is for law-abiding citizens to obtain firearms. They can and they will because it’s all they know how to do.

But for everyone else, information like this tells us a ton about what we’re really looking at when it comes to murders.

After all, we’re dealing with a surge in murders all across the nation. You’re deluding yourself if you think these numbers don’t hold up over the last year or so.