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The Effects of Firearm Violence on Children

Exposure to firearm violence persists as an urgent public health problem because of its prevalence and impact. In the United States, firearms are now the leading cause of death among all children, ages 1-19 years old, and nonfatal firearm assaults occur at more than twice the rate for youth compared to the general population. Furthermore, recent work has highlighted that 92 percent of all firearm-related deaths of 5- to 14-year-old children in high-income countries occur in the US. Firearm violence affects children not only through direct exposure, such as being threatened, injured, or killed by a firearm, but also through indirect exposure by hearing or witnessing incidents or by losing a peer or family member to this form of violence. Tragically, the burden of firearm violence falls disproportionally on children of color, particularly young Black men between the ages of 15 and 24 in urban settings. Research further illustrates that Black children between the ages of 5 and 17 years were exposed to violence in their neighborhoods 4.44 times more frequently than white children prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that these stark disparities have become even more pronounced since. An analysis of homicides in Washington, DC, in 2021 found that 89 percent of children of color (compared to 57 percent of white children) lived within a half mile of a homicide. In this brief, we describe the impact of exposure to violence on youth, review factors that are protective, highlight prevention and interventions for this urgent issue, and provide implications for policy.

Is electronic monitoring contributing to gun violence?

Amid a historic rise in gun violence, debates about the underlying factors driving the surge in Chicago have grown to include electronic monitoring (EM), a condition of pretrial release that equips people who have been arrested and assigned to EM with a GPS-monitored ankle bracelet while awaiting trial from home instead of jail. However, the lack of easily accessible public data makes it difficult for all sides to agree on the basic facts about EM and its potential effects on public safety. Analysis of the data we’ve received from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) allows us to ground the debate about EM in a few essential takeaways: for one, it’s an oversimplification to say that EM is driving gun violence in Chicago, given the timing of the relevant changes in the justice system and the small number of people arrested for gun violence while out on EM compared to overall victimizations. Nonetheless, the makeup of who is on EM has changed over the past few years: while the largest increase in the use of EM was for gun possession offenses, the number of people on EM for a homicide or shooting is also much higher than it was in 2016. We also see in the data that people out on EM are themselves victims of violence at a much higher rate than others in the city, suggesting that there’s more to be done to connect people on EM to helpful social services. In any data analysis, there are numerous details about both the data and analytical methods that can be important for understanding the nuances of what the data can and can’t tell us, as well as reasonable alternative choices about how to analyze the data, interpret and present the results, and address some of the limitations of the data themselves. Because of the space constraints in the article, we have omitted many of those details and sensitivity analyses from the published version. We provide those additional details here.

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:

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.