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https://rockinst.org/issue-area/schools-and-gun-violence-what-do-we-know-about-the-prevalence-and-effects/

On April 11, 2022, the Biden administration announced the submission of new rules issued by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), more specifically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), addressing the proliferation of ghost guns across the nation. This announcement came almost exactly one year after the president announced multiple executive actions designed to reduce gun violence, including requiring the DOJ and ATF to develop the new rules. These rules included qualifying ghost gun kits as “firearms” in line with the Gun Control Act of 1968, thereby requiring that any such kits have serial numbers on the firearm components. They also included a ban on certain forms of ghost guns, and a requirement that both commercial manufacturers and sellers of permitted kits be licensed. After federal judges in Texas and North Dakota decided that the new rules did not violate the Second Amendment in response to petitions for injunctive relief, they took effect on August 24, 2022.

What exactly are ghost guns, and what challenges do they pose? Moreover, what do these new rules do to contribute to a solution to such challenges? Privately made firearms (PMFs), which have become informally known as “ghost guns” due to their virtually untraceable nature, function similar to firearms wholly constructed by licensed firearm manufacturers but have a fraction of the regulations. In 2021, law enforcement in New York State recovered 637 PMFs (135 percent more than the year prior), reflecting continued annual increases from 44 in 2018 (the first year of reporting), 100 in 2019 (up 117 percent over the year prior), and 2020 (an increase of 171 percent). Other law enforcement agencies across the country, particularly those located in larger cities, have reported similar jumps in recoveries: Law enforcement in Boston has seen a nearly three-fold increase in the city since 2019; Philadelphia reported a five-fold increase since that year. Data from the ATF mirrors these trends: the recorded number of suspected PMF recoveries nationally increased more than 90 percent between 2020 and 2021 and more than ten-fold between 2016 and 2021. Such increases, however, must be interpreted with caution as they may be an artifact of increased reporting by jurisdictions.

While these increases represent a relatively low percentage of total gun recoveries, they illustrate that ghost guns pose a unique and rapidly growing challenge. Law enforcement agencies are unable to trace the origins of ghost guns used in crime and ultimately curb their flow at the source. While the federal government has taken first steps to regulate these weapons, state and local lawmakers have for several years been exploring and enacting policies designed to monitor and prevent ghost guns from falling into the hands of individuals who are prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms.

Schools and Gun Violence: What Do We Know About the Prevalence and Effects?

As the 2021-22 academic year came to a close, the United States was rocked by the news of another school mass shooting, this time at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen fourth-grade students and two of their teachers were killed when an 18-year-old former student entered the school through an unlocked door, made his way to his former fourth-grade classroom, and opened fire during a 77-minute rampage. Seventeen others were injured in the attack.

The tragedy in Uvalde conjured up memories of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Nearly 10 years earlier, 20 first-grade students and six of their educators, including the school’s principal, were killed after a 20-year-old shot his way into the building. Two others were injured during the six-minute attack.

In the aftermath of the shooting in Uvalde, administrators and policymakers struggled to implement policies and procedures that would prevent a similar attack in their schools or minimize the loss of life if one did occur. These included, but were not limited to, increases in the numbers and presence of school resource officers, authorization to arm teachers, and even supplying schools with ballistics shields, despite the lack of evidence to suggest these measures would achieve their intended goals in situations like Uvalde.

Amid growing fear and apprehension about another Sandy Hook or Uvalde happening and the proliferation of purported school safety measures, two questions occupy the minds of many: Are schools a safe place for children to be? And what actually works to make them safer?

As policymakers, school administrators, and other vested stakeholders continue to grapple with these questions, it is critical to plan for every instance of firearm violence on school grounds. In doing so, it is important to implement strategies that are based in research where evidence supports their efficacy in achieving prevention and/or harm mitigation. At the same time, it is imperative to consider not only the short-term effects but also longer-term impacts of both gun violence and the associated strategies for prevention and response on students. Researchers will be key in cultivating this evidence and must continue to work closely with policymakers, school administrators, and the public to protect children from the harmful effects of gun violence.

Curbing the Illicit Market: Enhancing Firearm Regulations to Reduce Gun Violence

America is entrenched in an ongoing epidemic of gun violence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, homicides and nonfatal shootings spiked, reaching unprecedented levels in many US cities. Gun violence remains exceptionally high around the country, although there is evidence that homicides are beginning to decrease in cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. Generally, the US has a homicide rate roughly 25 times higher than most peer industrialized countries and contains about 40 percent of the global stock of civilian firearms. Almost all of the firearms that end up on the streets are first sold through legally appointed federally licensed firearm dealers (FFLs) following manufacture or import. Given the unique ease of access to firearms in the US, there is a growing sense of urgency to better understand how crime guns are acquired and from where they originate to support much stronger supply-side efforts to address gun violence.

Prior research has focused extensively on the large “secondary market” for firearms, where guns are transferred between unlicensed persons or to those legally prohibited from buying a firearm. Most guns used in a crime are illegally acquired through secondary market channels via small-scale purchases, middlemen, and “fences” that supply weapons to local illicit markets. In contrast, the focus of our recent work has been on the “primary market,” which includes the legal retail sale of firearms from federally licensed firearm dealers (FFLs) to private consumers. The primary market directly feeds the illicit secondary market for firearms.

Can Mass Shootings be Stopped?

Over the last two years, there have been a number of high-profile mass public shootings in the United States that have dominated the headlines and captured the attention of the public and policymakers alike—from Buffalo, New York (May 14, 2022; 10 dead) to Uvalde, Texas (May 24, 2022; 21 dead), Highland Park, Illinois (July 4, 2022; 7 dead), Monterrey Park, California (January 21, 2023; 11 dead), and Louisville, Kentucky (April 10, 2023; 5 dead). Although mass public shootings rarely made headlines during the height of the pandemic, the frequency of events has since rebounded to pre-COVID levels. Consequently, these and other mass public shootings have reinforced the need to do more to prevent these tragedies from occurring and to mitigate the harms to individuals and communities if and when they happen. To achieve these goals, it is important to understand the trends associated with the phenomenon of mass public shootings.

The Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium (the Consortium) first published a report in 2018 analyzing 51 years (1966–2016) of mass public shootings data. In order to better understand the phenomenon of mass shootings, the report presented information on the location of shootings, weapons used, and demographics of the perpetrators. A follow-up report released in 2021 integrated an additional four years of data (2017–20). These reports were based on a comprehensive database of US mass public shootings from researchers Jaclyn Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass.

As the United States continues to face record rates of gun violence, with mass public shootings also increasing in frequency, the need for evidence-based policies is all the more important. A starting point, however, is understanding the different contexts and characteristics of various forms of firearm violence. Mass public shootings, although among the rarest forms of gun violence, require different strategies for prevention and response from other incidents. These shootings often involve considerable planning, which can provide important opportunities for identification, intervention, and de-escalation of the threat before it is carried out, unlike other forms of more spontaneous gun violence. Additionally, mass public shootings often are random in nature and occur in large, open public spaces, which present different challenges—including preventative security measures and law enforcement responses—from targeted incidents and those that occur in private locations.

Taken together, understanding the unique context of the mass public shootings phenomenon is necessary for policymakers, practitioners, and other vested stakeholders to work to reduce these incidents and their impacts. This updated report includes two additional years of data and identifies changes in trends related to mass shootings, particularly as Americans resumed activities like work and school outside of the home amid the rollout of the COVID vaccine. Specifically, this brief presents analyses of a total of 57 years of mass shootings data (1966–2022). The analyses include the frequency of events, fatalities and injuries, distribution of location types, patterns of weapon usage, and perpetrators’ demographic characteristics. The appendix reports the findings for only the two most recent years of data and compares them to the patterns for the previous 55 years.

K-12 School Shootings in Context: New Findings from The American School Shooting Study (TASSS)

Although statistically rare, fatal and nonfatal shootings in the United States at elementary, middle, and secondary schools remain important crime problems with significant public policy implications. Indeed, the impact of such violence exceeds the devastating fatalities and immense sorrow that survivors, families, and communities experience. Even one gunshot fired at a school can subject numerous individuals to the traumas of gun violence. Recent polls indicate that school shootings can also sway broader public views on crime, including attitudes toward violence reduction. As a result, school shootings have become a focal point of US politics, sparking crucial debates on the most effective strategies for preventing and responding to gun violence, both inside and outside K-12 schools.

While there has been a recent surge in school firearm violence studies, discrepancies persist in the research due to variations in definitions and datasets. Initially, our comprehension of school shootings originated from narrow studies focused on small samples of highly publicized mass killings where attackers indiscriminately fired upon multiple victims in their schools. By contrast, recent progress in quantitative studies and the establishment of extensive databases have provided alternative perspectives on the characteristics of school shootings more broadly. Within this domain, however, there are disparities in inclusion criteria, as some studies encompass school-related violence occurring both within and outside of school premises, leading to an inconsistent research base.

We created The American School Shooting Study (TASSS) in 2016 to address these incongruencies in the existing research. Previously, we reported findings from TASSS on the patterns and nature of US school-associated gun violence between 1990 and 2016, defined as the firing of a gun anywhere on K-12 school property, resulting in one or more gunshot injuries or fatalities, irrespective of the time of day or season. Our findings suggested critical nuances in school firearm violence regarding the situations they encompass, the characteristics of the perpetrator and victims, and the location of the incident on school grounds. For instance, this violence encompassed various scenarios, including interpersonal assaults, self-harm incidents where the shooter was the only victim, accidental gun discharges, and legally justified shootings. At the same time, mass casualty shootings (defined as four or more fatalities) were exceptionally infrequent, representing around 5 percent of all interpersonal assaults at schools. The other 95 percent of these shootings involved one or two victims, most of which were nonfatal incidents.

Even among the fatal and nonfatal interpersonal assaults involving known perpetrators, we found that gun violence at American schools displayed considerable variability. Although adults were responsible for almost 29 percent of such incidents, a significant majority (71 percent) involved young individuals aged between 6 and 19. Interestingly, many school shootings were carried out by individuals not enrolled in the schools, often occurring outside school buildings and outside school hours. These incidents were largely fueled by nonacademic concerns, such as personal disagreements or gang-related activities. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, multiple-victim attacks by troubled students account for just a minority of total cases. As such, it is beneficial for policymakers to differentiate between incidents of school shootings that take place within the school during school hours and those that occur outside the school buildings when the school is not in operation. Depending on the specific nature of each incident, tailored intervention strategies are essential. Just as responses to premeditated mass shootings differ from spontaneous assaults, there will be important qualitative differences here between cases that affect how officials prepare, prevent, and respond to school shootings.

In this brief, we present new insights from TASSS, diving deeper into the database’s potential to examine the locations, timing, and student involvement of youth-perpetrated gun violence. In the end, our goal is to equip stakeholders with the essential data they need to formulate effective policies that mitigate school violence.

Employment and Earnings of Men at High Risk of Gun Violence

Since Becker (1968), economists have modeled crime as resulting from higher returns to criminal activity than legal work. Yet contemporary employment data for people engaged in crime is scarce. We surveyed men at extreme risk of gun violence in Chicago about their work in the formal, informal, and criminal sectors. Noncriminal work is common. Two-thirds of respondents specialize solely in the criminal or noncriminal sectors, both earning about minimum wage at the median. Those who mix across sectors typically earn higher wages. We describe workers by type to demonstrate how better understanding sectoral specialization could inform program design.

Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes

We examine how shootings at schools—an increasingly common form of gun violence in the United States—impact the educational and economic trajectories of students. Using linked schooling and labor market data in Texas from 1992 to 2018, we compare within-student and across-cohort changes in outcomes following a shooting to those experienced by students at matched control schools. We find that school shootings increase absenteeism and grade repetition; reduce high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion; and reduce employment and earnings at ages 24–26. We further find school-level increases in the number of leadership staff and reductions in retention among teachers and teaching support staff in the years following a shooting. The adverse impacts of shootings span student characteristics, suggesting that the economic costs of school shootings are universal.

Probable Causation, Ep. 88: Sara Heller & Max Kapustin

EPISODE DETAILS:

In this episode, we discuss their work on how to reduce gun violence:

“Predicting and Preventing Gun Violence: An Experimental Evaluation of READI Chicago” by Monica P. Bhatt, Sara B. Heller, Max Kapustin, Marianne Bertrand, and Christopher Blattman.

OTHER RESEARCH WE DISCUSS IN THIS EPISODE:

Predicting and Preventing Gun Violence: An Experimental Evaluation of READI Chicago

Gun violence is the most pressing public safety problem in U.S. cities. We report results from a randomized controlled trial (N = 2,456) of a community-researcher partnership called the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI) Chicago. The program offered an 18-month job alongside cognitive behavioral therapy and other social support. Both algorithmic and human referral methods identified men with strikingly high scope for gun violence reduction: for every 100 people in the control group, there were 11 shooting and homicide victimizations during the 20-month outcome period. Fifty-five percent of the treatment group started programming, comparable to take-up rates in programs for people facing far lower mortality risk. After 20 months, there is no statistically significant change in an index combining three measures of serious violence, the study’s primary outcome. Yet there are signs that this program model has promise. One of the three measures, shooting and homicide arrests, declined 65% (p = .13 after multiple-testing adjustment). Because shootings are so costly, READI generated estimated social savings between $182,000 and $916,000 per participant (p = .03), implying a benefit-cost ratio between 4:1 and 18:1. Moreover, participants referred by outreach workers—a prespecified subgroup—saw enormous declines in arrests and victimizations for shootings and homicides (79% and 43%, respectively) which remain statistically significant even after multiple-testing adjustments. These declines are concentrated among outreach referrals with higher predicted risk, suggesting that human and algorithmic targeting may work better together.