Firearm violence and racial capitalism: A conceptual framework for understanding the persistence and prevalence of gun violence in the United States.

Firearm violence is a leading cause of death in the United States and is marked by profound racial and socioeconomic disparities. Existing research has identified many of the conditions that make interpersonal firearm violence more likely, and intervention research shows that firearm regulation, targeted policing, and community-based programs can reduce harm. Yet firearm violence remains high, persistent, and unequally distributed. This article develops a racial capitalism framework to explain that persistence. Building on structural racism approaches, it asks how the conditions associated with firearm violence are linked to accumulation, extraction, and profit. Drawing on a structured database of 395 citations, the article situates research on segregation, economic precarity, illicit markets, firearm availability, policing, and community intervention within a broader political-economic system. It shows how labor market exclusion, housing extraction, informal economies, firearm production and circulation, and state harm management jointly produce conditions in which violence becomes more likely and more lethal. In this account, firearm violence is not simply an unintended consequence of inequality. It is a predictable feature of systems that make insecurity profitable while concentrating harm in racially marginalized communities. The framework extends public health research and policy by directing greater attention to the political-economic arrangements that reproduce violence.