This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.
As Dr. Sharven Taghavi sat before Cincinnati’s Public Safety Committee to testify on the connection between gun violence and food insecurity, he knew he had to be clear. It was 2024, two years after the New Orleans-based trauma surgeon first published a study that found a clear association between the dual health crises: patients who showed up with firearm injuries were more likely to come from communities with food insecurity.
“You can certainly show that there’s an association between food-insecure parishes and violent injury or gun violence,” Taghavi, a trauma surgeon and researcher at Tulane University, recently told The Trace.
His testimony helped Cincinnati secure $850,000 in funding that supported community organizations working to improve access to healthy food as a form of gun violence prevention. It is the sort of initiative that remains an outlier as political support for both health issues has waned.
“People are going to feel stressed”
Dr. Randi Smith – Atlanta trauma surgeon
when they lack access to food.
”We’ve seen this time and time again —
when people are in a state of stress and on alert,
violence goes up.”
In the year since Congress passed President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”, a sweeping tax and spending law that reduced federal spending on programs like Medicaid, 4 million people have lost access to what is commonly referred to as “food stamps.” The changes were drastic, from raising the age of able-bodied workers to 64, to requiring states to cover more of the program’s cost.
“When people’s basic needs are not being met, I think that contributes to gun violence,” Taghavi said. “It’s increasing food insecurity by taking away those benefits, so I do worry that that could increase gun violence, at least in certain areas.
”For years, research has shown that access to food stamps or SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is associated with a lower risk of firearm injury. States that expanded SNAP programs saw lower rates of firearm-involved suicides, according to a 2024 study. The following year, an Emory University study found that every 10 percentage point increase in state-level SNAP benefits corresponded to a 4% decrease in firearm deaths among Black Americans.
Last year, Black and Hispanic Americans were twice as likely as white Americans to report experiencing food insecurity; those disparities show up in the emergency rooms where gun violence victims are treated. After more than three years in an Atlanta emergency room, Dr. Randi Smith, a trauma surgeon and public health researcher, noticed that many of the gunshot patients she was treating were going back into food-insecure communities.
In 2020, Smith published a groundbreaking study of more than 1,600 gunshot patients and found that limited access to healthy food had a strong statistical association with rates of gunshot injury in Atlanta. Of 33 zip codes she studied, just five with high levels of food insecurity accounted for half of all the gunshot injuries in the dataset.
“When I looked at some of the social drivers of health that led people to be injured in the first place, or that impacted their recovery, I always kept coming back to food,” said Smith, who co-authored an op-ed earlier this year in the Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons suggesting that food assistance be included in trauma recovery. “The root cause of food insecurity is probably the same root cause of gunshot wounds, which is having limited access and disinvestment in the basic needs of certain communities.
”But as researchers drew a connection between food access and gun violence, political pushback against the decades-old SNAP program was growing, drawing on criticisms and dog whistles first popularized during the Reagan administration.
In the 1990s, the political focus on “food stamp fraud” mirrored the federal “war on crime,” including firearm homicide. Both focused on what researchers called “the effect of social disadvantage,” rather than the cause, and national data has since shown claims of fraud to be largely unsubstantiated.
“People are going to feel stressed,” when they lack access to food, Smith said. ”We’ve seen this time and time again — when people are in a state of stress and on alert, violence goes up.”
This pattern could be particularly true when it comes to children and teens. Roughly a quarter of American children rely on food stamps, and hunger can have severe health consequences that overlap with susceptibility to firearm violence. At least 776,000 of the recipients who recently lost SNAP benefits are children, and that number is estimated to rise as more states implement the legislation.
The Big Beautiful Act’s changes to SNAP began in late 2025 and will continue to be rolled out through 2034. As states implement new policies on SNAP eligibility, the effect has been uneven, with many of the poorest recipients facing the steepest cuts.
In Louisiana, where Taghavi focused his research and which in 2023 had the second-highest gun death rate in the country, 22% of Louisianans have lost access to SNAP, according to the most recent figures. It is expected that Mississippi and Florida, which are both in the top 20 states with the highest rates of firearm mortality, will face some of the steepest cuts. Arizona, which is consistently among the top 20 in the nation’s highest rates of firearm suicide, has already lost 53% of SNAP recipients.
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that Louisiana is a poor state, and we see these disparities among social determinants, and we have high rates of violent injury,” Taghavi said.
Researchers emphasize that it’s a cycle.
“If people go home and they don’t eat, then they don’t heal, their wounds break down, they get infections, they lose weight,” said Smith, the trauma surgeon and researcher. “The consequences compound one on top of the other.”
