What I'm wondering is how much of that fall in the homicide rate from the 1990s to 2015 was due to emergency rooms getting much, much better at saving people's lives, including bullet wounds (and thus, not becoming a statistic). I've heard that much of the decline in homicide rates in recent years is due to this factor alone. I have no way to verify this, but I'm wondering if anyone has looked at the issue and tried to adjust for it in the statistics, or if it's just invisible.