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Spatial de-concentration of firearm violence in Boston

It is a “law” of criminology that urban crime chronically recurs at the same microplaces (i.e., street segments and intersections). An influential study found high concentrations of firearm violence at micropl…

Firearm death in US vs other countries

Gun violence in the US is the leading cause of death among children and teenagers, drives down life expectancy, and cost the economy around $557bn in 2022, says a report from the Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit organisation that researches healthcare issues and promotes improved quality and efficiency in healthcare.1The study used data from the global burden of disease study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle.Mass shootings in the US get much media attention but represent less than 2% of gun deaths in the US, the report says. Mass shootings are those in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter. There were 656 mass shootings in the US in 2023, reports the Gun Violence Archive,2 and at least 385 so far this year.An earlier Commonwealth Fund study showed that in 2019 the US had 10.4 deaths per…

The gun debate’s new mythical number: How many defensive uses per year?

In this article, we discuss the candidacy of one of the more surprising numbers to surface in the course of America’s gun debate: that 2.5 million Americans use a gun defensively against a criminal attacker each year [Kleek and Gertz, 1995]. News items, editorial writers, even Congressional Research Service [Bea, 1994] have mention the 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU’s) as established fact. This number is considerably higher than our best estimate of the number of crimes committed each year with a firearm (1.3 million)[U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996]. and has been used as an argument against regulations that would restrict widespread firearms ownership. The implicit notion seems to be that if there are more legitimate uses than criminal uses of guns against people, then widespread gun ownership is a net plus for public safety.

In Search of Common Ground: Expert Judgments on Gun Policy Effects

As our review of the existing literature demonstrated, there is very little scientific evidence available to support the decisions that policymakers and the public must make about whether to implement or change various gun policies. Without strong scientific evidence, policymakers and the public rely heavily on what advocates or social scientists believe the effects of policies are most likely to be. The opinions of these gun policy experts are an important influence on gun policy debates and decisions because people believe that the experts have an especially well-informed understanding of the gun polices under consideration, how similar laws have performed historically, and how specific policies would affect particular stakeholder groups.

Different communities of gun policy experts have sharply divided views on many gun policies, as often becomes clear in the debates that occur when states and the federal government consider new gun legislation. Less clear is whether there are laws or policies for which such differences are less stark, or whether there may be a combination of policies that experts of every stripe could regard as an improvement over existing policies. Finally, it has not been clear whether experts disagree about which objectives gun policies should be trying to achieve or whether experts agree on the objectives but disagree on which policies are most likely to achieve those objectives. If the experts chiefly disagree on the latter, this suggests a role for new and better scientific study of the true effects of gun policies.

To begin to answer these questions, RAND researchers surveyed 173 gun policy experts (across two fieldings in 2016 and 2020) on what they believed the effects of the following 19 gun policies would be on ten different outcomes.