WASHINGTON – From the Texas school massacre to a Tulsa hospital shooting and many less-reported incidents, a recent spate of gun violence across America bears out a trend police departments have long sworn by: murders go up in warmer weather.
The link has been written about for decades by criminologists, with more recent research drilling down on the precise relationship between temperature and crime rates.
For those who have studied the question, there are common sense as well as potentially less obvious mechanisms at play.
First, the more obvious: “It’s hard to shoot somebody if there’s nobody…
