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Why do gun murders have a higher clearance rate than gunshot assaults?

Research Summary

The prevailing view is that follow-up investigations are of limited value as crimes are primarily cleared by patrol officers making on-scene arrests and through the presence of eyewitnesses and forensic evidence at the initial crime scene. We use a quasi-experimental design to compare investigative resources invested in clearing gun homicide cases relative to nonfatal gun assaults in Boston. We find the large gap in clearances (43% for gun murders vs. 19% for nonfatal gun assaults) is primarily a result of sustained investigative effort in homicide cases made after the first 2 days.

Policy Implications

Police departments should invest additional resources in the investigation of nonfatal gun assaults. When additional investigative effort is expended, law enforcement improves its success in gaining the cooperation of key witnesses and increases the amount of forensic evidence collected and analyzed. In turn, the capacity of the police to hold violent gun offenders accountable, deliver justice to victims, and prevent future gun attacks is enhanced.

Underground Gun Markets

This article provides an economic analysis of underground gun markets, drawing on interviews with gang members, gun dealers, professional thieves, prostitutes, police, public school security guards and teenagers in the city of Chicago, complemented by results from government surveys of recent arrestees in 22 cities, plus administrative data for suicides, homicides, robberies, arrests and confiscated crime guns. We find evidence that transactions costs are considerable in the underground gun market in Chicago, and to some extent in other cities as well. The most likely explanation is that the underground gun market is both illegal and ‘thin’– relevant information about trading opportunities is scarce due to illegality, which makes search costly for market participants and leads to a market thickness effect on transaction costs.

Gun Markets

The systematic study of how available weapons influence the rates, patterns, and outcomes of criminal violence is new, but it is now a well-established and fast-growing subfield in criminology, legal studies, public health, and economics. This review focuses on the transactions that arm dangerous offenders, noting that if those transactions could be effectively curtailed it would have an immediate and profound effect on gun violence and homicide rates. Guns are legal commodities, but violent offenders typically obtain their guns by illegal means. Our knowledge of these transactions comes primarily from trace data on guns recovered by the police and from occasional surveys of gun-involved offenders. Because most guns used in crime are sourced from the stock of guns in private hands (rather than a purchase from a licensed dealer), the local prevalence of gun ownership appears to influence the transaction costs and the proportions of robberies and assaults committed with guns rather than knives or other weapons. Nonetheless, regulations that govern licensed dealers have been linked to trafficking patterns and in some cases to the use of guns in crime.

New US Surgeon General Advisory on Gun Violence

Deaths from firearms have soared in the US over the past few decades. Now, guns are the leading cause of death of children. In addition, the majority of adults report they’ve experienced gun violence, including being threatened by a firearm or witnessing someone getting shot.

Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault

Among a long list of issues facing the American public, guns are third only to gay marriage and abortion in terms of people who report that they are ‘‘not willing to listen to the other side.’’
In concert with this cultural rift, scholarly discussion over guns has been similarly contentious. Although scholars and the public agree that the roughly 100000 shootings each year in the United States are a clear threat to health, uncertainty remains as to whether civilians armed with guns are, on average, protecting or endangering themselves from such shootings. Several case–control studies have explored the relationship between homicide and having a gun in the home, purchasing a gun, or owning a gun. These prior studies were not designed to determine the risk or protection that possession of a gun might create for an individual at the time of a shooting and have only considered fatal outcomes. This led a recent National Research Council committee to conclude that, although the observed associations in these case–control studies may be of interest, they do little to reveal the impact of guns on homicide or the utility of guns for self-defense. However, the recent National Research Council committee also concluded that additional individual-level studies of the association between gun ownership and violence were the
most important priority for the future. With this in mind, we conducted a population-based
case–control study in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to investigate the relationship between being
injured with a gun in an assault and an individual’s possession of a gun at the time. We included
both fatal and nonfatal outcomes and accounted for a variety of individual and situational confounders also measured at the time of assault.

Can Mass Shootings be Stopped?

The mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, happened nearly two decades ago, yet it remains etched in the national consciousness. Columbine spurred a national debate — from personal safety to the security of schools, workplaces, and other locations and to broader considerations of guns and mental illness. To this day, communities still are grappling to find solutions to the complex and multifaceted nature of mass shootings.

What Are the Most Effective Policies in Reducing Gun Homicides?

The public mass shootings in Newtown, Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Pittsburgh, and, especially, Parkland have brought the issue of firearm violence to the forefront. These tragedies have sparked a national debate about federal and state policies to reduce firearm violence. State policymakers are grappling to identify solutions by considering multiple legislative proposals, from red flag laws to universal background checks to bans on assault weapons to stricter regulation of semiautomatic weapons. Some states are considering laws that make it easier to carry and use firearms in public. Still others are debating laws aimed at eradicating gun culture, by — for example — banning all gun-related activities (such as shooting clubs or trainings) at public high schools. With a myriad of often conflicting ideas and proposals, where does a state policymaker begin?

This policy brief will help state policymakers navigate the scientific evidence regarding the impact of state firearm laws on gun-related homicide. Taking advantage of new data resulting from a research project at the Boston University School of Public Health and with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Evidence for Action Program,[1] we developed a comprehensive database of state firearm laws spanning the period 1991-2016.  We then examined the impact of a range of state firearm laws on total, firearm-related, and nonfirearm-related homicide rates at the state level during this time period. The State Firearm Laws Database is publicly available at www.statefirearmlaws.org.

Our analysis found three priority pieces of legislation that would have the greatest impact in reducing overall firearm homicide rates:

Universal background checks.

+ Prohibition of gun possession by people with a history of any violent misdemeanor, threatened violence, serious alcohol-related crime, or subject to a domestic violence restraining order. This must be accompanied by: (1) a requirement that firearms already in their possession be surrendered; (2) a procedure for confiscating guns if they are not relinquished voluntarily; and (3) procedures for confiscating guns in situations where a person becomes prohibited from owning firearms after having passed an earlier background check.

+ Laws that give discretion to law enforcement officials (“may issue” laws) in denying concealed carry permits to those who are at high risk for violence, especially those who have a criminal history of violence.

The purpose of this research was not simply to identify a list of laws that “work” and laws that “do not work.” The advantage of this research is that it allowed us to compare the impact of multiple laws at the same time, enabling us to obtain a sense of what laws appear to be most strongly associated with lower rates of firearm homicide. Ultimately, our goal was to identify the types of laws that appear to have the greatest impact and which should therefore be a priority for policymakers.