The Relationship between Firearm Prevalence and Violent Crime
"In the past 12 years, several new studies found that increases in the
prevalence of gun ownership are associated with increases in violent
crime. Whether this association is attributable to gun prevalence
causing more violent crime is unclear. If people are more likely to
acquire guns when crime rates are rising or high, then the same pattern
of evidence would be expected. An important limitation of all studies in
this area is the lack of direct measures of the prevalence of gun
ownership.
...In this essay, we examine the empirical evidence on the relationship
between firearm prevalence and violent crime, including homicide,
domestic violence, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery. Most of the
studies we examined used the proportion of suicides that were firearm
suicides (FS/S) as a proxy for gun prevalence."
Your resource for news, research, opinion and comment in the world of Criminology and Criminal Justice, brought to you by the Criminology Library, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto
Showing posts with label gun violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun violence. Show all posts
Road Rage with Guns more than Doubles in Three Years, Report Says
"When
the former N.F.L. player Joe McKnight was shot and killed last year in
what the authorities described as a case of road rage, it was a
high-profile example of what has been a marked increase in the use of
guns in such confrontations, a new analysis shows.
The analysis was published by The Trace,
a nonprofit news organization focused on gun violence. It found that
cases of road rage involving a firearm — where someone brandished a gun
or fired one at a driver or passenger — more than doubled to 620 in
2016, from 247 in 2014."
Is Gun Violence Stunting Business Growth?
"Gun violence imposes heavy social, psychological, and financial burdens on both individuals and society at large. Some of these burdens are known—we learn of the emotional cost from news stories and moving personal accounts, and we have previously calculated the health care costs of treating gunshot injuries. But we know comparatively little about the relationship between gun violence and local economic health.
In the communities and neighborhoods most affected by gun violence, is the presence of guns—absent other factors—impeding business growth?
A recent longitudinal study shows that neighborhood-level economic activity affects the conditions that make crime more likely and that violent crime can decline in the same year that economic activity increases. Earlier studies by Bowes and Greenbaum and Tita show that crime and fear of crime adversely affect the economic health of communities, cutting into business revenues and limiting business activity. New Urban research led by Yasemin Irvin-Erickson builds on these findings by exploring the association between gun violence and economic health of neighborhoods in six cities: Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Oakland, California; Rochester, New York; San Francisco, California; and Washington, DC.
This study integrates innovative data from several sources, including the National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) database, gunshot detection technology, and credit bureau data, to develop concrete numbers describing the association between gun violence and local economic health. An interim report presents findings from Oakland, Washington, DC, and Minneapolis and explores the association between gun violence and business trends by census tract, using fixed effects panel models and analysis of observational data with statistical matching."
View the Interim Report
"Gun violence imposes heavy social, psychological, and financial burdens on both individuals and society at large. Some of these burdens are known—we learn of the emotional cost from news stories and moving personal accounts, and we have previously calculated the health care costs of treating gunshot injuries. But we know comparatively little about the relationship between gun violence and local economic health.
In the communities and neighborhoods most affected by gun violence, is the presence of guns—absent other factors—impeding business growth?
A recent longitudinal study shows that neighborhood-level economic activity affects the conditions that make crime more likely and that violent crime can decline in the same year that economic activity increases. Earlier studies by Bowes and Greenbaum and Tita show that crime and fear of crime adversely affect the economic health of communities, cutting into business revenues and limiting business activity. New Urban research led by Yasemin Irvin-Erickson builds on these findings by exploring the association between gun violence and economic health of neighborhoods in six cities: Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Oakland, California; Rochester, New York; San Francisco, California; and Washington, DC.
This study integrates innovative data from several sources, including the National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) database, gunshot detection technology, and credit bureau data, to develop concrete numbers describing the association between gun violence and local economic health. An interim report presents findings from Oakland, Washington, DC, and Minneapolis and explores the association between gun violence and business trends by census tract, using fixed effects panel models and analysis of observational data with statistical matching."
View the Interim Report
How the "Digital Exhaust" of Social Media Data can Predict Gun Violence
"Unveiled at the SXSW technology festival, a group of data scientists and activists have demonstrated for the first time a new way to predict and study gun violence using social media. Scraping Tweets, Google searches, obituaries and local news, they’ve created a livesteam of gun-related discussion and a map of violence and geo-tagged posts. By reading this 'digital exhaust' of data they hope to create 'digital phenotypes' and understand how people are behaving around guns, when and why."
"Unveiled at the SXSW technology festival, a group of data scientists and activists have demonstrated for the first time a new way to predict and study gun violence using social media. Scraping Tweets, Google searches, obituaries and local news, they’ve created a livesteam of gun-related discussion and a map of violence and geo-tagged posts. By reading this 'digital exhaust' of data they hope to create 'digital phenotypes' and understand how people are behaving around guns, when and why."
Does "Right-to-Carry" Lead to More Crime?
"So-called 'right-to-carry' gun laws are associated with higher rates of aggravated assault, rape, robbery and murder, according to a recently released Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University study.
For decades, gun rights supporters and foes have debated whether laws that allow more people to have guns create an environment where less crime is committed.
All 50 states have laws allowing certain concealed weapons in public.
Researchers expanded on a 2004 National Research Council study that covered county-level crime data between 1977 and 2000, adding in six additional years of county information and state-level data from 1979-2010.
'Our analysis of admittedly imperfect gun aggravated assaults provides suggestive evidence that RTC laws may be associated with large increases in this crime, perhaps increasing such gun assaults by almost 33 percent,' researchers wrote.
The study also found that homicide rates increased in eight states that adopted right-to-carry laws between 1999 and 2010."
View the study
"So-called 'right-to-carry' gun laws are associated with higher rates of aggravated assault, rape, robbery and murder, according to a recently released Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University study.
For decades, gun rights supporters and foes have debated whether laws that allow more people to have guns create an environment where less crime is committed.
All 50 states have laws allowing certain concealed weapons in public.
Researchers expanded on a 2004 National Research Council study that covered county-level crime data between 1977 and 2000, adding in six additional years of county information and state-level data from 1979-2010.
'Our analysis of admittedly imperfect gun aggravated assaults provides suggestive evidence that RTC laws may be associated with large increases in this crime, perhaps increasing such gun assaults by almost 33 percent,' researchers wrote.
The study also found that homicide rates increased in eight states that adopted right-to-carry laws between 1999 and 2010."
View the study
Mass Shootings Are Becoming More Frequent
After a man opened fire at Los Angeles’s airport a few months ago,
friends and coworkers undoubtedly turned to each other shaking their
heads: Could this really be happening again, so soon? Are these things
getting more frequent, or am I imagining it?
You’re not imagining it, according to a new study obtained by Yahoo! News on Thursday. The report, which is set for release in a Federal Bureau of Investigations bulletin next week, finds that mass shootings have indeed become more common. They have spiked from five a year between 2000 and 2008 to 16 a year from 2009 to 2012.
The report also sheds some light on who is committing mass shootings, and how: 94 percent of gunmen are men, though they range significantly in age. Forty percent of mass shootings happen at businesses, while 29 percent take place at schools. Fifty-nine percent of the time, the gunmen use handguns, and 26 percent of the time rifles.
They claim, on average, two lives.
Read on...
You’re not imagining it, according to a new study obtained by Yahoo! News on Thursday. The report, which is set for release in a Federal Bureau of Investigations bulletin next week, finds that mass shootings have indeed become more common. They have spiked from five a year between 2000 and 2008 to 16 a year from 2009 to 2012.
The report also sheds some light on who is committing mass shootings, and how: 94 percent of gunmen are men, though they range significantly in age. Forty percent of mass shootings happen at businesses, while 29 percent take place at schools. Fifty-nine percent of the time, the gunmen use handguns, and 26 percent of the time rifles.
They claim, on average, two lives.
Read on...
Unlearning Gun Violence
In 1995, an epidemiologist named Gary Slutkin returned to the United
States from Africa where he had spent the previous decade helping
Africans stem the spread of diseases like tuberculosis, AIDS and
cholera. “I was exhausted,” he said in a TED Talk earlier this year. “I wanted to come home and take a break.”
Once back in Chicago, however, friends kept telling him about the
epidemic of violence in inner-city neighborhoods. As he began to study
the problem he came to the view that gun violence in poor neighborhoods
did indeed resemble the epidemics he had treated in Africa. Maps that
charted gun violence showed clustering — just like maps tracking
infectious diseases. The greatest predictor of violence was a prior
violent incident, which also mirrors epidemics.
In 2000, he founded CeaseFire (now known as Cure Violence),
a Chicago-based organization that treated violence in one such local
cluster — in West Garfield, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the
city — as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice issue.
Shootings dropped dramatically.
STUDY: Gun Violence Hospitalizations Cost Over $600 Million In 2010 Alone
Emergency room and inpatient procedures related to firearm injuries cost $629 million in 2010 alone, according to a new study
by the Urban Institute. Since a large majority of these injuries
afflicted poor males from low-income regions, U.S. taxpayers subsidized
over half the costs of the treatments through public insurance programs.
Victims of gun violence are almost exclusively men aged 15 years and older, with American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprising 69 percent of firearm assault injuries. Women constituted just nine percent of gun injuries across all ages.
Researchers found that the average emergency room visit for a gun injury ran $1,126, while an inpatient visit cost $23,497 — $14,000 more than the average cost of all inpatient stays in 2010.
Read on...
Victims of gun violence are almost exclusively men aged 15 years and older, with American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprising 69 percent of firearm assault injuries. Women constituted just nine percent of gun injuries across all ages.
Researchers found that the average emergency room visit for a gun injury ran $1,126, while an inpatient visit cost $23,497 — $14,000 more than the average cost of all inpatient stays in 2010.
Read on...
Largest Gun Study Ever: More Guns, More Murder
The largest study of gun violence in the United States, released
Thursday afternoon, confirms a point that should be obvious: widespread
American gun ownership is fueling America’s gun violence epidemic.
The study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time.
Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called “fixed effect regression” to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: “age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate” were all accounted for.
Read on...
The study, by Professor Michael Siegel at Boston University and two coauthors, has been peer-reviewed and is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health. Siegel and his colleagues compiled data on firearm homicides from all 50 states from 1981-2010, the longest stretch of time ever studied in this fashion, and set about seeing whether they could find any relationship between changes in gun ownership and murder using guns over time.
Since we know that violent crime rates overall declined during that period of time, the authors used something called “fixed effect regression” to account for any national trend other than changes in gun ownership. They also employed the largest-ever number of statistical controls for other variables in this kind of gun study: “age, gender, race/ethnicity, urbanization, poverty, unemployment, income, education, income inequality, divorce rate, alcohol use, violent crime rate, nonviolent crime rate, hate crime rate, number of hunting licenses, age-adjusted nonfirearm homicide rate, incarceration rate,and suicide rate” were all accounted for.
Read on...
34 People Were Shot In Chicago On July 4
As the country celebrated July 4, Chicago saw another day where gun violence claimed dozens of victims, with six people killed and 28 left wounded. The youngest of those wounded included two boys, ages 5 and 7, who were celebrating the holiday with their families.
Chicago has had a particularly terrible record on gun violence the last couple years. In 2012, it had more gun homicides than New York City despite having one-third the population. And on Father’s Day Weekend this year, another 46 people were shot in one of Chicago’s deadliest 72 hours of 2013.
Despite these numbers, police say Chicago gun violence for the first half of 2013 is at its lowest in nearly 50 years, with about 25 percent fewer shootings and murders compared to the same period in 2012. Even though Chicago is experiencing fewer gun homicides this year, the violence disproportionately costs low-income, minority communities the most: Close to 90 percent of murders and violent crimes occur in low-income areas where mostly black and Latino people live, and nearly half of Chicago homicide victims are under age 25.
Read on...
Chicago has had a particularly terrible record on gun violence the last couple years. In 2012, it had more gun homicides than New York City despite having one-third the population. And on Father’s Day Weekend this year, another 46 people were shot in one of Chicago’s deadliest 72 hours of 2013.
Despite these numbers, police say Chicago gun violence for the first half of 2013 is at its lowest in nearly 50 years, with about 25 percent fewer shootings and murders compared to the same period in 2012. Even though Chicago is experiencing fewer gun homicides this year, the violence disproportionately costs low-income, minority communities the most: Close to 90 percent of murders and violent crimes occur in low-income areas where mostly black and Latino people live, and nearly half of Chicago homicide victims are under age 25.
Read on...
Schools Are Training Second-Graders to Attack Mass Shooters
Braden Kling, an eight-year-old from Middletown, Ohio, knows what to do.
His school has prepared him for the moment of reckoning. "We have this
big board and we hide behind that. If he comes in, we start throwing
stuff," he explains. "Pencils, chairs, boxes, books, markers. And then
we escape."
In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, politicians and educators have debated fiercely about how our nation should protect school children—with some schools turning to controversial tactics. Soon after National Rifle Association spokesman Wayne LaPierre proposed stationing armed guards in every school in America, an Ohio school board approved plans to arm janitors. South Dakota recently passed a law allowing teachers to pack heat in classrooms. A high school in suburban Chicago held a drill in which police fired blanks in the halls in order to give staff and students "some familiarity with the sound of gunfire." Unsurprisingly, these kinds of measures have brought with them risks, accidents, and negative reactions.
Perhaps the most controversial approach has been instructing school children to fight back. After Newtown, one commentator was met with derision when she suggested that kids should be trained to "gang rush" a mass shooter rather than to hide from him. The US Department of Homeland Security recommends hiding or fleeing if possible when faced with the threat of a gunman, and fighting back only as a last resort.
Read on...
In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, politicians and educators have debated fiercely about how our nation should protect school children—with some schools turning to controversial tactics. Soon after National Rifle Association spokesman Wayne LaPierre proposed stationing armed guards in every school in America, an Ohio school board approved plans to arm janitors. South Dakota recently passed a law allowing teachers to pack heat in classrooms. A high school in suburban Chicago held a drill in which police fired blanks in the halls in order to give staff and students "some familiarity with the sound of gunfire." Unsurprisingly, these kinds of measures have brought with them risks, accidents, and negative reactions.
Perhaps the most controversial approach has been instructing school children to fight back. After Newtown, one commentator was met with derision when she suggested that kids should be trained to "gang rush" a mass shooter rather than to hide from him. The US Department of Homeland Security recommends hiding or fleeing if possible when faced with the threat of a gunman, and fighting back only as a last resort.
Read on...
Romney Blames Single Parents for Gun Violence
Having candidates go off the rails when asked a question is an
expected and entertaining part of any presidential debate. But still, my
heart went out to the woman who asked a simple question about
restricting access to assault rifles and got a lecture on the evils of
single parenting. The question was a simple one, directed at President
Obama:
QUESTION: President Obama, during the
Democratic National Convention in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep
AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done
or planned to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?
Read on...
Sikh Temple: In the Wake of Yet Another Massacre, What Will it Take to Stop the Gun Madness?
The reason we can't have a sane, adult discussion of how to cut down on
random gun violence is simple: the NRA has hoodwinked gun owners.
The United States is not the only country to experience the horrors of mass shootings. We are, however, the only society in which a serious discussion of tighter gun controls doesn't follow incidents like the massacres we've seen at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin or the movie theater in Aurora. In fact, in most countries these kinds of tragedies result in some kind of concrete legislative action.
The reason we can't have a sane, adult discussion of how to cut down on random gun violence is simple: the NRA has hoodwinked a lot of reasonable gun owners into believing that there's a debate in this country over banning firearms altogether. We'll never be able to have a serious discussion about how to cut down on gun violence until that group accepts the actual terms of the debate. And the NRA has a vested interest in making sure they remain obscure because the organization represents gun manufacturers and a small, highly ideological minority of gun-nuts, rather than (typically responsible) gun owners.
And that means that, at least in theory, there is political space for a new kind of gun control advocacy – one that isn't about whether Americans have a right to bear arms, but instead explicitly advocates safe and responsible gun ownership, a goal the polls tell us most gun owners would embrace.
Read on...
The United States is not the only country to experience the horrors of mass shootings. We are, however, the only society in which a serious discussion of tighter gun controls doesn't follow incidents like the massacres we've seen at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin or the movie theater in Aurora. In fact, in most countries these kinds of tragedies result in some kind of concrete legislative action.
The reason we can't have a sane, adult discussion of how to cut down on random gun violence is simple: the NRA has hoodwinked a lot of reasonable gun owners into believing that there's a debate in this country over banning firearms altogether. We'll never be able to have a serious discussion about how to cut down on gun violence until that group accepts the actual terms of the debate. And the NRA has a vested interest in making sure they remain obscure because the organization represents gun manufacturers and a small, highly ideological minority of gun-nuts, rather than (typically responsible) gun owners.
And that means that, at least in theory, there is political space for a new kind of gun control advocacy – one that isn't about whether Americans have a right to bear arms, but instead explicitly advocates safe and responsible gun ownership, a goal the polls tell us most gun owners would embrace.
Read on...
From Aurora to Anaheim, Guns Are Going Off Everywhere
Welcome to the abattoir—a nation where a man can walk into a store and
buy an assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of Glocks; where in the
comfort of his darkened living room, windows blocked from the sunlight,
he can rig a series of bombs unperturbed and buy thousands of rounds of
ammo on the Internet; where a movie theater can turn into a killing
floor at the midnight hour.
We know about all of this. We know because the weekend of July 20 became all-Aurora-all-the-time, a round-the-clock engorgement of TV news reports, replete with massacre theme music, an endless loop of victims, their loved ones, eyewitness accounts, cellphone video, police briefings, informal memorials, and “healing,” all washed down with a presidential visit and hour upon hour of anchor and “expert” speculation. We know this because within a few days a Google search for “Aurora movie shootings” produced over 200 million hits referencing the massacre that left seventy-plus casualties, including twelve fatalities.
We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.
But to the people living near La Palma Avenue and North Anna Drive, the shooting of Manuel Diaz was all too familiar: it was the sixth, seventh or eighth police shooting in Anaheim, California, since the beginning of 2012. (No one seems quite sure of the exact count, though the Orange County District Attorney’s office claims six shootings, five fatalities.)
Read on...
We know about all of this. We know because the weekend of July 20 became all-Aurora-all-the-time, a round-the-clock engorgement of TV news reports, replete with massacre theme music, an endless loop of victims, their loved ones, eyewitness accounts, cellphone video, police briefings, informal memorials, and “healing,” all washed down with a presidential visit and hour upon hour of anchor and “expert” speculation. We know this because within a few days a Google search for “Aurora movie shootings” produced over 200 million hits referencing the massacre that left seventy-plus casualties, including twelve fatalities.
We know a lot less about Anaheim and the killing of Manuel Angel Diaz, shot in the back and in the head by that city’s police just a few short hours after the awful Aurora murders.
But to the people living near La Palma Avenue and North Anna Drive, the shooting of Manuel Diaz was all too familiar: it was the sixth, seventh or eighth police shooting in Anaheim, California, since the beginning of 2012. (No one seems quite sure of the exact count, though the Orange County District Attorney’s office claims six shootings, five fatalities.)
Read on...
Mayor Rob Ford simplifies issue of gun violence
Once again, the scourge of gun violence has come to the fore in our
city. The bedlam has generated impulsive and careless comments, some
bordering on racism.
Most notable were Mayor Rob Ford and Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s call to deport firearms offenders. This begs the question: Will Kenney’s majority Conservative government change Canada’s citizenship laws so that Canadian citizens who commit gun crimes are also exiled? Of course not, because this would be unconstitutional. So let’s tone down the rhetoric and animus.
Unfortunately, the mayor and minister have not been alone in simplifying a complex social issue — our society at large, including the news media, have been culpable as well.
Whether it takes place at an obscure location between rival factions or in a “public” space such as Danzig St. or the Eaton Centre, we must denounce all incidents of gun violence equally and unequivocally. Failing to do so only reaffirms the dangerous fallacy that the lives of some are less valued than those of others in our city, thus contributing to the sense of hopelessness faced by many youth.
Read on...
Most notable were Mayor Rob Ford and Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s call to deport firearms offenders. This begs the question: Will Kenney’s majority Conservative government change Canada’s citizenship laws so that Canadian citizens who commit gun crimes are also exiled? Of course not, because this would be unconstitutional. So let’s tone down the rhetoric and animus.
Unfortunately, the mayor and minister have not been alone in simplifying a complex social issue — our society at large, including the news media, have been culpable as well.
Whether it takes place at an obscure location between rival factions or in a “public” space such as Danzig St. or the Eaton Centre, we must denounce all incidents of gun violence equally and unequivocally. Failing to do so only reaffirms the dangerous fallacy that the lives of some are less valued than those of others in our city, thus contributing to the sense of hopelessness faced by many youth.
Read on...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)