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.
Archives
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
Aiming for Evidence Based Gun Policy
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.
US Surgeon General Declares Firearm Violence a Public Health Crisis
This Medical News article is an interview with US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA, and JAMA Editor in Chief Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS, about a new advisory that declares gun violence a public health crisis.
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.