Fewer domestic violence deaths in Chicago, but more attacks with guns

What happened

The Chicago Tribune reported on Sunday that domestic violence homicides in Chicago are down while attacks with guns in domestic violence cases are up. The Tribune’s headline carries a warning: “Still so much danger.” The exact figures and the period they cover are in the Tribune’s original report, along with the people it interviewed, and we encourage readers to open it.

Independent data shows a similar picture for domestic violence overall. According to a July 2026 analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, Chicago’s reported domestic violence rate in the first half of 2026 was 11% lower than in the same months of 2025 and 19% below the 2024 peak. The council cautioned that not every crime is reported to police and that cities can revise their numbers. The same analysis found Chicago’s overall homicide rate in the first half of 2026 was 3% higher than a year earlier.

The split between deaths and gun attacks has shown up before. In December 2023 the Tribune reported that domestic violence shootings in Chicago rose that year even as overall shootings and homicides fell, with fatal domestic shootings flat compared with 2022 and nonfatal ones up 27%. A source quoted in that report pointed to easier access to firearms during the pandemic as a likely driver.

Our reflection

Fewer funerals is good news, and I will take it. Somebody’s mother is alive this Thanksgiving who might not have been. But a city can read that number and exhale too soon. More gun attacks in domestic cases means more people facing a weapon held by someone who knows their schedule and where the kids sleep. Surviving a gun attack is a long way from being safe. The children who hear it through a bedroom wall do not show up in a homicide count at all.

Jeremiah wrote about leaders who treated a deep wound lightly and called it peace. He wanted the wound healed. What he could not stand was comfort that let everybody stop looking. A gun pulled at home rarely comes out of nowhere. It comes after the texts that track her, the punched wall, the gun set on the table and put back in the drawer, the threat about the kids.

Jesus traced it further back. In Matthew 5 he put the angry heart under the same judgment as the killing hand. That reaches into rooms most of us would rather keep closed. Plenty of men who would never touch a weapon have learned to run a house with silence and a slammed door. The father who hit, the mother who left: those old wounds keep making decisions in a kitchen thirty years later until someone brings them into the light.

Scripture’s picture of a man in his home is Christ, who “gave himself up” for his bride (Ephesians 5:25). He bled for her. She never bleeds for him. Any church that has sent a bruised wife back home to submit owes God and that woman repentance. And Jesus is the one who stopped a whole crowd in Mark 5 to find a woman who had suffered in secret for twelve years, then called her daughter in front of everyone. He does not let hidden pain stay hidden. There is grace for the man with the gun too, real grace. It starts with confession and with giving up the weapon. After that it means submitting to help over years, with no shortcut through a tearful Sunday.

Change here is slow and local. Intervention workers who meet young people on the street can learn to ask about home, because a teenager who watched his father with a gun is carrying something that will not stay in the house. In our fatherhood and biblical manhood groups, men talk about anger before it has a trigger. Churches can keep the National Domestic Violence Hotline number (1-800-799-7233) posted where a woman can read it alone, and can have a plan ready for the day she asks.

If you lead a church, or you know your own temper better than anyone else does, start below this week.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace.

Jeremiah 6:14

Source: Chicago Tribune, “‘Still so much danger’: Domestic violence homicides down but attacks with guns up”