Gun Violence Is Still Stealing St. Louis Lives

The homicide numbers may be falling, but a review of the people killed across the St. Louis region in 2026 shows why progress cannot be mistaken for peace.

There is a danger in talking about homicide in numbers.

Numbers make comparison possible. They tell us whether violence is rising or falling, where it is concentrated, and whether policies appear to be working. But numbers can also make death feel abstract. A homicide count does not tell us what it means when a seven-month-old baby never reaches her first birthday, when a 16-year-old is killed at a block party, or when someone waiting for a bus or stopping at a gas station becomes collateral damage in somebody else’s argument.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s 2026 Homicide Tracker provides a different way of looking at violence. It documents victims across St. Louis city and the surrounding Missouri and Illinois counties, recording names, ages, neighborhoods and brief accounts of how people died.

Read one after another, the entries reveal something that a yearly homicide total cannot: the extraordinary role guns continue to play in turning conflict, anger, domestic violence, crime and accidents into irreversible loss.

By my count of the tracker entries through August 23, there are 169 homicide victims listed across the region. The descriptions explicitly identify at least 120—roughly 71 percent—as deaths involving shootings or gunfire. Within St. Louis city itself, the tracker lists 88 homicide victims, with at least 62 of those deaths involving firearms.

Those figures should not obscure an important reality: St. Louis has made progress on homicide. City officials reported 263 homicides in 2020, falling to 201 in 2021, 200 in 2022 and 160 in 2023. Through August 2024, the city had recorded 106 homicides. Declining homicide is good news, and violence-prevention programs that are contributing to that decline should be strengthened.

But “better” and “acceptable” are not the same thing.

A Baby, Teenagers and Bystanders

Consider some of the people behind the statistics.

On June 26, seven-month-old Kiyomi Parker was shot and killed inside a home on North Broadway in the Baden neighborhood. Police rushed her to a hospital, but she died. A 10-year-old boy and the baby’s father were later charged in connection with the shooting.

Two days earlier, Norman Hardieway, 15, had been shot in Forest Park Southeast. Earlier that month, Oliver Williams, 16, was found shot inside Yeatman Market in the O’Fallon neighborhood.

The deaths continued into July. Tashawn Hudson, 17, was killed in College Hill shortly after midnight on July 5. Two 16-year-olds were injured in the same shooting. Lamerion Davis, 16, was shot later that month in Cahokia Heights.

But gun violence does not only kill the person at the center of a dispute.

On June 30, Shakeela Martin, 35, stopped at a Ferguson gas station with her children. Police said someone fired from another vehicle at somebody else. Martin was hit and killed in front of her children.

On July 10, Rashad Rice, 52, was riding a MetroBus when an argument involving two other men erupted into gunfire. Police described Rice as an innocent bystander. He and 24-year-old Michael Hunter were both killed.

These are not interchangeable stories. Domestic violence is different from street violence. An accidental shooting is different from an intentional homicide. Police shootings, robberies and interpersonal disputes require different interventions.

What connects many of them is the presence of a weapon capable of making a terrible decision immediately lethal.

Guns Change the Consequences of Conflict

Human beings become angry. Teenagers act impulsively. Couples fight. Drivers lose their tempers. People commit crimes. Those realities exist in every society.

The policy question is what happens next.

The tracker includes a June 30 case involving Luke Sherman, 35, in St. Charles County. Police said an aggressive driving encounter escalated until Sherman got out of his vehicle and approached the other driver’s car. The other driver shot him.

Without a gun, the confrontation could still have become violent. With one, it became fatal.

That distinction is central to any serious conversation about gun violence. Violence prevention cannot rest on the fantasy that government can eliminate human anger, conflict, desperation or recklessness. It can, however, attempt to reduce the likelihood that those moments end with someone dead.

Yet St. Louis is constrained in doing so.

Missouri law explicitly preempts most local firearm regulation, declaring that the General Assembly occupies the field of legislation concerning firearms and restricting cities and counties from adopting their own rules governing such matters as firearm sales, transfers, possession and licensing, with limited exceptions.

That leaves a city experiencing the consequences of gun violence with limited authority over the instrument responsible for so much of it.

Violence Prevention Requires More Than Policing

The answer cannot simply be more police.

Police respond after a trigger has often already been pulled. A peace economy approach asks a different question: What investments make it less likely that the trigger gets pulled in the first place?

That means treating gun violence not only as a criminal-justice problem but as a public-health, economic and community problem.

It means adequately funding violence interrupters and credible messengers who can intervene before retaliation occurs. It means youth employment, recreation and mentorship. It means accessible mental-health and domestic-violence services. It means stable housing, functioning schools, trauma care and neighborhoods where young people can imagine futures larger than the conflicts immediately surrounding them.

And it means acknowledging the guns themselves.

Investment in communities and reasonable firearm policy are not competing explanations for violence. We do not have to choose between asking why someone became violent and asking why a lethal weapon was so readily available when they did.

Both questions matter.

The Post-Dispatch tracker illustrates why. A 28-year-old pizza worker was shot while working. A woman was killed while stopping for gas. Teenagers were killed at homes, stores, parties and on neighborhood streets. A baby was shot before she could walk. A bus passenger died because he happened to be near somebody else’s dispute.

These deaths occurred in different municipalities and under different circumstances. But together they describe a region in which firearms remain extraordinarily present in moments of crisis.

Falling Numbers Are a Beginning

St. Louis should take genuine encouragement from reductions in homicide. Evidence that fewer people are being killed should be studied, celebrated and used to guide further investment.

But success cannot simply mean becoming accustomed to a smaller number of funerals.

The goal should not be to make St. Louis slightly less deadly. The goal should be to build communities in which a teenager can attend a block party, a mother can stop for gas, a worker can finish a shift, a passenger can ride a bus and a baby can sleep inside her home without gunfire determining whether they survive the day.

Every line in a homicide tracker represents the point at which prevention failed.

The challenge now is to invest further upstream—before an argument becomes a shooting, before trauma becomes retaliation, before a young person picks up a gun, and before another name has to be added to the list.

Gun violence is not an unavoidable feature of life in St. Louis.

The people recorded in this year’s homicide tracker deserve more than our attention after they die. They deserve policies built around keeping the next name from appearing there.