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The Association of Firearm Caliber With Likelihood of Death From Gunshot Injury in Criminal Assaults

Importance  A foundational issue in firearms policy has been whether the type of weapon used in an assault affects the likelihood of death.

Objective  To determine whether the likelihood of death from gunshot wounds inflicted in criminal assaults is associated with the power of the assailant’s firearm as indicated by its caliber.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Cross-sectional study with multivariate analysis of data on shooting cases extracted by the authors from police investigation files for assaults that took place in Boston, Massachusetts, between January 1, 2010, and December 31, 2014. These data were analyzed between October 1, 2017, and February 18, 2018. In all cases the victim sustained 1 or more gunshot wounds in circumstances that the Boston Police Department deemed criminal. The working sample included all 221 gun homicides and a stratified random sample of 300 nonfatal cases drawn from the 1012 that occurred during the 5-year period. Seven nonfatal cases were omitted because they had been misclassified.

Exposures  The primary source of variation was the caliber of the firearm used to shoot the victim.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Whether the victim died from the gunshot wound(s).

Results  The final sample of 511 gunshot victims and survivors (n = 220 fatal; n = 291 nonfatal) was predominantly male (n = 470 [92.2%]), black (n = 413 [80.8%]) or Hispanic (n = 69 [13.5%]), and young (mean [SD] age, 26.8 [9.4] years). Police investigations determined firearm caliber in 184 nonfatal cases (63.2%) and 183 fatal cases (83.2%). These 367 cases were divided into 3 groups by caliber: small (.22, .25, and .32), medium (.38, .380, and 9 mm), or large (.357 magnum, .40, .44 magnum, .45, 10 mm, and 7.62 × 39 mm). Firearm caliber had no systematic association with the number of wounds, the location of wounds, circumstances of the assault, or victim characteristics, as demonstrated by χ2 tests of each cluster of variables and by a comprehensive multinomial logit analysis. A logit analysis of the likelihood of death found that compared with small-caliber cases, medium caliber had an odds ratio of 2.25 (95% CI, 1.37-3.70; P = .001) and large caliber had an odds ratio of 4.54 (95% CI, 2.37-8.70; P < .001). Based on a simulation using the logit equation, replacing the medium- and large-caliber guns with small-caliber guns would have reduced gun homicides by 39.5%.

Conclusions and Relevance  Firearms caliber was associated with the likelihood of death from gunshot wounds in criminal assault. Shootings with larger-caliber handguns were more deadly but no more sustained or accurate than shootings with smaller-caliber handguns. This conclusion is of direct relevance to the design of gun policy.

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.

The Effect of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns

Social scientists have started to find answers to some of the questions raised in the ongoing debate over gun control. The basic factual issue in this debate concerns the effect of gun availability on the distribution, seriousness, and number of violent crimes. Some evidence is available on each of these dimensions of the violent crime problem. The distribution of violent crimes among different types of victims is governed in part by the “vulnerability pattern” in weapon choice. The seriousness of robbery and assault incidents is influenced by weapon type, as indicated by the objective dangerousness and instrumental violence pattern. A reduc tion in gun availability would cause some weapon substitution and probably little change in overall robbery and assault rates—but the homicide rate would be reduced.

Does Gun Prevalence affect teen gun carrying after all?

Previous research suggests that American adolescents usually have ready access to guns, and that the extent of misuse of guns by adolescents is not much affected by local gun prevalence or regulation. This “futility” claim is based on one interpretation of survey data from several cities, but has not been tested directly. Here we do so using microdata from a nationally representative survey, the 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males. Using the restricted geo-coded version of these data, and conditioning on an extensive set of covariates, we find (among other results) that the likelihood of gun carrying increases markedly with the prevalence of gun ownership in the given community. We also analyze the propensity to carry other types of weapons, finding that it is unrelated to the local prevalence of gun ownership. The prevalence of youths carrying both guns and other weapons is positively related to the local rate of youth violence (as measured by the robbery rate), confirmatory evidence that weapons carrying by youths is motivated in part by self-protection.

The Effect of Gun Availability on Robbery and Robbery Murder: A Cross-Section Study of Fifty Citie

Firearms are used in a large proportion of the violent crimes of robbery, assault, and murder. The widespread availability of firearms, particularly handguns, has frequently received part of the blame for the extraordinarily high rates of violent crimes in the United States, and the violent crime wave of the 1965-1975 decade may have been fueled in part by the growth in the availa­ bility of handguns in urban areas. Advocates of stringent gun control have long argued that the adoption of a program which made it more costly or timeconsuming or legally risky for criminals to obtain guns would have the effect of reducing the amount and seriousness of violent crimes (see Newton and Zimring, 1969).

The Great American Gun War: Notes from Four Decades in the Trenches

In this essay I provide an account of how research on gun violence has evolved over the last four decades, intertwined with personal observations and commentary on my contributions. It begins with a sketch of the twentieth century history of gun control in the United States. I then provide an account of why gun violence is worth studying, with a discussion of how and why the type of weapon used in crime matters, and assess the social costs of the widespread private ownership of firearms. I then detour into the methodological disputes over estimating basic facts relevant to understanding gun use and misuse. In Section IV, I focus on how gun availability influences the use of guns in crime and whether the incidence of misuse is influenced by the prevalence of gun ownership, regulations, and law enforcement. I go on to review evaluations of efforts to focus law enforcement directly at gun use in violent crime. Next I turn to the hottest topic of our day, the role of guns in self-defense and what might be deemed private deterrence. The conclusion summarizes the claims and counterclaims concerning gun regulation and asks, finally, if there is the possibility of an influential role for scientific research in the policy debate.

Regulating Gun Markets

With the rapid increase since the mid-1980’s in rates of homicide and other criminal violence, crime has emerged as the nation’s leading domestic problem. One tactic for mitigating lethal violence is gun control –government regulation of the production, exchange, and use of personal firearms. A number of proposals are currently being debated at the federal, state, and local levels. Recently, Congress enacted the Brady Bill and adopted a partial ban on assault weapons, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) toughened sales procedures for gun-dealers. A central issue in debating these and other control measures is which types of regulation are likely to be most cost-effective in reducing gun violence.

This Article concerns the secondary gun market, one of the key issues in understanding the potential effectiveness of gun control measures. The primary objective of much of the gun control effort in the United States is to discourage certain categories of people, including felons and those under indictment, from obtaining and possessing guns, while preserving ready availability of guns for everyone else.

The Influence of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns

The spectacular increases in violent crime that began in the mid-1960s continue, and Americans are currently being murdered, robbed, and raped at historically unprecedented rates. Firearms are used in a minority of violent crimes but are of special concern because more than 60 percent of the most serious crimes-criminal homicides-are committed with firearms. This essay presents a variety of evidence to the effect that the widespread availability of firearms contributes to the criminal homicide rate and influences violent crime patterns in several other respects as well. A gun is usually superior to other weapons readily available for use in violent crime; even in the hands of a weak and unskilled assailant, a gun poses a credible threat and can be used to kill quickly, from a distance, and in a relatively “impersonal” fashion. Guns are particularly valuable against relatively invulnerable targets. Hence, gun availability facilitates robbery of commercial places and lethal assaults on people who would ordinarily be able to defend themselves against other weapons. Some of the patterns of gun use in violent crime can be readily interpreted in terms of relative vulnerability of different types of victims. Guns are also more dangerous than other weapons, in the sense that victims of robbery and assault are more likely to be killed if the assailant uses a gun. On the other hand, the victim is less likely to be injured in a gun robbery than in other robberies, since the gun robber usually does not feel the need to employ physical force. This analysis suggests a number of predictions concerning the effects of gun availability on the number, distribution, and seriousness of violent crimes. In principle, these predictions could be tested directly by observing the effects of changes in gun availability on statistical characterizations of violent crime patterns. Not much research of this sort has been done, in part because it is difficult to find a suitable measure for gun availability. Future research should be directed toward remedying this problem. In the meantime, it seems fair to conclude from the available evidence that the type of weapon is not an incidental aspect of violent crime, but rather has a substantial influence on the nature of the encounter and its likely consequences.

The Social Costs of Gun Ownership

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates, and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using county- and state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun prevalence as between + 0.1 and + 0.3. All of the effect of gun prevalence is on gun homicide rates. Under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual marginal social cost of household gun ownership is in the range $100 to $1800