The belief that guns deter crime and support for capital punishment

One of the many reasons for gun ownership in the USA is the belief that citizen gun ownership helps to reduce crime. The rationale for this belief can be linked to deterrence – the perception that the threat of harm from confronting someone with a gun outweighs the potential benefit from crime – and will reduce the likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior. Similarly, deterrence is often referenced as a reason to support capital punishment. This is the first study to explicitly link support for the individual threat of lethal violence and the state threat of lethal violence by testing the hypothesis that the belief that guns reduce crime is positively correlated with support for capital punishment. Tests using a 2010 survey support this hypothesis for general support of capital punishment and for support of capital punishment with the life without parole option. The theoretical implications of considering deterrence as a value-expressive argument are explored.     

刑事司法裁量的边际均衡——从枪支认定标准与赵春华案切入

立足于真实的社会生活实践而不是想象的概念语词,能更好地厘清涉枪案件刑事司法面临的困境。经由枪支认定标准,刑事司法权力突兀地介入普通民众的正常社会生活,打破司法权力与公民权利的基本边际均衡,造成了刑事司法裁量的尴尬。刑法意义上的具有高度危险性的枪支,不应该与普通民众生产、经营、游艺所使用玩具枪、仿真枪的正常活动发生关联。刑事司法不侵扰普通民众的日常生活,这是刑事司法权力与公民社会利益的基本边际均衡。以一个侵扰公民正常社会生活的枪支认定标准为基础对涉枪案件进行“综合考量”,只会增加刑事司法的内部复杂性,进而造成刑事司法正当性的严重削弱。只有直面真实的社会生活实践,摒弃迷恋语词的法律形式主义思维,看重刑事司法的系统性后果,确定适宜的枪支认定标准,维护刑事司法裁量的基本边际均衡,才能有效化解涉枪犯罪司法治理的困境。     

THE TRADE IN TOOLS: THE MARKET FOR ILLICIT GUNS IN HIGH‐RISK NETWORKS

Illegal guns circulating among high‐risk networks represent a threat to the security and well‐being of urban neighborhoods. Research findings reveal that illegal firearms are usually acquired through a variety of means, including theft and diversions from legitimate firearms commerce. Little is known, however, about the underground gun markets supplying the gang and drug networks responsible for a large share of gun violence in U.S. cities. In this article, we take a mixed‐methods approach, combining trace analyses of recovered handguns with ethnographic interviews of high‐risk gun users to develop new insights on the entry of guns into three criminal networks in Boston. We find that guns possessed by Boston gang members are of a different character compared with other crime guns; these guns are more likely to be older firearms originating from New Hampshire, Maine, and I‐95 southern states. The results of our qualitative research reveal that gang members and drug dealers pay inflated prices for handguns diverted by traffickers exploiting unregulated secondary market transactions, with significant premiums paid for high‐caliber semiautomatic pistols. Taken together, these findings provide an analytic portrait of the market for illicit guns among those most proximate to violence, yielding novel empirical, theoretical, and practical insights into the problem of criminal gun access.     

CITIZEN GUN OWNERSHIP AND CRIMINAL DETERRENCE: THEORY,RESEARCH, AND POLICY*

Research on the general and specific deterrents emanating from citizenowned firearms is examined under assumptions about deterrence. Only slight and indirect empirical evidence for deterrence exists in the area of citizen gun ownership. The crime-reducing effects associated with public policies that support civilian gun ownership are balanced in light of other, negative public health factors associated with citizen-owned guns.     

Serious Youth Gun Offenders and the Epidemic of Youth Violence in Boston

Boston, like many other major cities, experienced a sudden increase in youth homicides during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Research evidence suggests that the recent epidemic of urban youth violence was intensely concentrated among criminally active young black males residing in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods rather than all young black males residing in disadvantaged black neighborhoods. Other researchers, however, suggest that there was a diffusion of guns and gun violence from youth involved in street crack markets to youth outside the drug trade who armed themselves primarily for self-protection against the armed criminally active youth. In this paper, criminal history data are analyzed to determine whether the criminal profile of Boston arrested youth gun offenders changed over time and micro-level data on youth gun assault incidents in Boston are examined to unravel whether there were noteworthy changes in the nature of these violent events over time. The results of these analyses suggest that the youth violence epidemic in Boston was highly concentrated among serious youth gun offenders rather than a diffusion of guns away from the street drug trade, gangs, and criminally active youth.     

Violence,Guns, and Suicide in New Orleans: Results from a Qualitative Study of Recent Suicide Decedents

Many Americans own guns to protect themselves against other people, but there is evidence that both victimization and gun access increase suicide risk. We conducted qualitative interviews with informants of 17 suicide cases in New Orleans of the 60 who died between January 2015 and April 2016 to understand the relationship between past trauma, gun access and storage, and suicide. Nine cases had experienced a past trauma, including three who had recently had a family member killed by homicide. Eight died via firearm; of those, seven owned the guns they used to take their lives and stored them locked (but loaded) at home or in their cars. Preventing community violence and addressing its sequelae may be important for reducing suicides. A multi‐pronged strategy consisting of policies, education, and marketing will likely be needed to address the risk of suicide conferred by gun access.     

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.     

Crime Gun Risk Factors: Buyer,Seller, Firearm,and Transaction Characteristics Associated with Gun Trafficking and Criminal Gun Use

Objective

To better understand the workings of illicit gun markets by identifying the characteristics of buyers, sellers, firearms, and transactions that predict whether a gun is used in crime or obtained by an illegal possessor subsequent to purchase.

Methods

The study employed multivariate survival analysis utilizing data on nearly 72,000 guns sold in the Baltimore metropolitan area from 1994 through 1999 and subsequent recoveries of over 1,800 of those guns by police in Baltimore through early 2000.

Results

Adjusting for exposure time, guns sold in the Baltimore area had a 3.2 % chance of being recovered by police in Baltimore within 5 years. Guns were more likely to be recovered if: they were semiautomatic, medium to large caliber, easily concealable, and cheap; the buyers were black, young, female, living in or close to the city, and had previously purchased guns that were recovered by police; the dealer making the sale was, most notably, in or near the city and had made prior sales of crime guns; and the gun was purchased in a multiple gun transaction. The adoption of a law regulating secondhand gun sales in Maryland did not appear to affect the likelihood of a gun’s recovery, though the extent of the law’s enforcement is unclear.

Conclusions

Risk factors identified in this study could be used to guide gun trafficking investigations, regulation of gun dealers, and the development of prevention efforts for high-risk actors and areas. The results also provide some support for policies that regulate particular types of firearms and transactions. Limitations to the study and directions for future research are discussed.     

Impact of the Stand Your Ground law on gun deaths: evidence of a rural urban dichotomy

We explore the impact of the Stand Your Ground (SYG) law on gun deaths by degree of urbanization. Unlike firearm homicides the definition of firearm deaths does not depend on the broadening of the self-defense provision that the SYG law represents. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that the SYG law had no impact on gun deaths at the state level. However, once the U.S. states are disaggregated into portions by degree of urbanization—central city, suburb, small urban area and rural area—we find that the law increased gun deaths in the central cities and the suburbs, and had no impact in smaller urban areas and rural areas. These findings are consistent with the fact that there is a great divide between urban and rural areas in terms of ownership and usage of guns, attitudes towards guns, and the implications thereof. The finding of increased violence in the suburbs is of particular interest in the historical backdrop whereby the growth of the suburbs, to a large extent, may have been motivated by a desire to escape crime and violence.     

The Mobility of Stolen Guns in Quebec

Research on crime guns has traditionally focused on the time-to-crime measure. This study shifts the focus to guns that entered the illegal firearm market through thefts. This subset of guns allows us to examine the same process and objective underlying the time-to-crime measure—that being the recovery process. Two new measures are proposed. The first, time-to-find, assesses the time span between a gun’s theft and seizure by police. The second, distance-to-recovery, introduces a spatial dimension to the crime gun repertoire by measuring the distance a firearm travels between its points of theft and seizure. Using a mix of national (Canada) and provincial (Quebec) data on crime guns, this study’s findings show that these two new measures are tapping into a unique phenomenon: whereas time-to-crime accounts for a gun’s complete lifecycle, time-to-find and distance-to-recovery reflect a gun’s criminal lifecycle. At the multivariate level, the most influential factor explaining both time-to-find and distance-to-recovery is the registration status of the gun. Non-registered crime guns took longer to find and traveled lengthier distances between the moments and points of theft and seizure. Our explanation for this is that non-registered guns may be stolen from sources that are more problematic to begin with and, thus, result in the gun’s transition toward a segment of the illegal market that is also more problematic and in demand than the pool of firearms represented by registered guns. This would embed the firearm more deeply into the illegal market, making it more difficult to retrieve and more likely to be dispersed across a wider geographical plane than guns which are registered to begin with.     

The effect of perceived risk and victimization on plans to purchase a gun for self-protection

Purposes

To determine if perceived risk of criminal victimization, and past criminal victimization experiences, increases the likelihood of a person owning a gun for self-protection, and to determine if defects in past research concerning the way gun ownership was measured had obscured such effects.

Methods

We analyzed data on over 2,500 U.S. adults, using different ways of measuring gun ownership, and also analyzed future plans (among persons who did not own a gun at the time of the survey) to acquire a gun for self-protection. The latter procedure avoids the causal order problem attributable to the possibility that acquiring a gun might affect victimization risks and perceived risks, as well as the reverse.

Results

The estimated effect of perceived risk and prior victimization changed from being nonsignificant when household gun ownership was the dependent variable (as in most prior research) to being increasingly strong, and statistically significant, when gun ownership of the individual respondent for defensive reasons was measured. Further, once the causal order issue was side-stepped, risk and victimization showed even stronger, significant positive effects on planning to get a gun.

Conclusions

Crime affects gun ownership, in addition to any effects that gun ownership may have on crime.     

The impact of gun control and gun ownership levels on violence rates

What effects do gun control restrictions and gun prevalence have on rates of violence and crime? Data were gathered for all 170 U.S. cities with a 1980 population of at least 100,000. The cities were coded for the presence of 19 major categories of firearms restriction, including both state- and city-level restrictions. Multiple indirect indicators of gun prevalence levels were measured and models of city violence rates were estimated using two-stage least-squares methods. The models covered all major categories of intentional violence and crime which frequently involve guns: homicide, suicide, fatal gun accidents, robbery, and aggravated assaults, as well as rape. Findings indicate that (1) gun prevalence levels generally have no net positive effect on total violence rates, (2) homicide, gun assault, and rape rates increase gun prevalence, (3) gun control restrictions have no net effect on gun prevalence levels, and (4) most gun control restrictions generally have no net effect on violence rates. There were, however, some possible exceptions to this last conclusion—of 108 assessments of effects of different gun laws on different types of violence, 7 indicated good support, and another 11 partial support, for the hypothesis of gun control efficacy.     

PATTERNS OF LEGAL FIREARMS OWNERSHIP: A Cultural and Situational Analysis of Illinois Counties

Using county level data for the state of Illinois, we constructed a path analytic model predicting legal gun ownership for men. women, and minors. We consider the interplay between situational and cultural variables in determining legal ownership. Two patterns of firearms ownership are identified: (1) gun ownership among women as a response to high rales of violent crime and (2) a sporting culture. Neither pattern has strong relations to urban-rural differences amoung counties. Legal gun ownership is not necessarily related to a violent subculture. Ownership may be part of, a response to, or totally unrelated to a subculture of violence.     

FEDERAL LEGISLATION AND GUN MARKETS: HOW MUCH HAVE RECENT REFORMS OF THE FEDERAL FIREARMS LICENSING SYSTEM REDUCED CRIMINAL GUN SUPPLIERS?*

Research Summary: Following reforms of the federal firearms licensing system, nearly 70% of the nation's retail gun dealers active in 1994 dropped out of business by 1998. Dropout dealers supplied one‐third of guns recovered and traced by police but were linked to fewer crime guns than were other dealers, most likely because dropouts tended to be lower volume dealers. It is not clear if guns sold by dropouts had a higher probability of being used in crime, but guns supplied by dropouts did not move into criminal channels more quickly. Policy Implications: If federal reforms have reduced the availability of guns to criminals, the effect has probably been more modest than suggested by the overall reduction in dealers. Producing further reductions in the flow of guns to criminals through oversight of gun dealers will require refinement in the identification of problematic gun dealers.     

THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF GUN OWNERSHIP: SELF-PROTECTION IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT*

Based on a survey of 539 residents of Cincinnati, this study assesses various explanations of gun ownership. The analysis reveals that gender and childhood socialization into a gun culture are significantly related to protective and general (or “sport”) firearm possession. In contrast, only protective gun ownership appears to be linked to crime-related factors. Conservative crime ideology and concern about the relative level of crime in one's neighborhood increase armament for defensive purposes, while informal collective security—the belief that neighbors will provide assistance against criminal victimization—reduces protective gun ownership.     

CRIMES, DISORDERS, AND THE DEMAND FOR HANDGUNS: An Empirical Analysis

In a recent paper, Bordua and Lizotte (1979) analyze determinants of firearm ownership using cross-sectional data for Illinois counties. Noting that firearms may be purchased for the purpose of sport, self-protection, or crime, they present clear evidence of sporting demand and limited evidence of defensive motives in the pattern of gun ownership. Crime rates are significant only in the equation explaining gun ownership by women (1979: 161). The purpose of the present article is to supplement the findings of Bordua and Lizotte and earlier empirical studies by focusing on the demand for handguns alone. In particular, the article analyzes the role of crime rates and fear of violence in motivating citizens to buy and keep handguns. For this purpose, aggregate time-series and cross-sectional data on handgun sales were collected and analyzed. Because handguns are durable pieces of equipment, it is necessary to use a model that distinguishes the stock of handguns at any one time from the rate of handgun purchases.     

Is Gun Violence Contagious? A Spatiotemporal Test

Objectives

Existing theories of gun violence predict stable spatial concentrations and contagious diffusion of gun violence into surrounding areas. Recent empirical studies have reported confirmatory evidence of such spatiotemporal diffusion of gun violence. However, existing space/time interaction tests cannot readily distinguish spatiotemporal clustering from spatiotemporal diffusion. This leaves as an open question whether gun violence actually is contagious or merely clusters in space and time. Compounding this problem, gun violence is subject to considerable measurement error with many nonfatal shootings going unreported to police.

Methods

Using point process data from an acoustical gunshot locator system and a combination of Bayesian spatiotemporal point process modeling and classical space/time interaction tests, this paper distinguishes between clustered but non-diffusing gun violence and clustered gun violence resulting from diffusion.

Results

This paper demonstrates that contemporary urban gun violence in a metropolitan city does diffuse in space and time, but only slightly.

Conclusions

These results suggest that a disease model for the spread of gun violence in space and time may not be a good fit for most of the geographically stable and temporally stochastic process observed. And that existing space/time tests may not be adequate tests for spatiotemporal gun violence diffusion models.

     

Are Risky Youth Less Protectable as They Age? The Dynamics of Protection during Adolescence and Young Adulthood

Research on recidivism in criminal justice and desistance in criminology are not integrated. Yet, both fields are moving towards models that look at how positive elements in a person’s environment can impact a person’s behavior, conditional on different levels of risk. This study builds on this observation by applying interactional theory and the concept of Risk–Needs–Responsivity to theorize that both Needs and Responsivity will change over time in predictable ways. We then use a novel empirical approach with the Rochester Youth Development Study to show that even in late adolescence, individuals who are at risk for violence can be protected from future violence and risky behavior like gun carrying with positive events in their environment and personal life. In young adulthood, fewer people are still at risk for violence, and those who are at risk are harder to protect from future violence and gun carrying.     

A configurational analysis of 44 US mass shootings: 1975–2015

This study identifies the conditions under which civilian shooter events in the United States become mass episodes of killing. Hitherto, researchers have examined many individual-level variables associated with mass shootings including personal deprivation, family problems, mental illness, among others. Apart from a handful of quantitative studies, scholars have yet to provide a comparative scope to the multiplicity of factors that are influential in bringing about a mass murder. Adopting fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, this study analyses (n = 44) civilian acts of violence that took place from 1975 to 2015 in which some shootings resulted in few deaths and others turned into mass bouts of killing. Empirical results reveal that no variables on their own are sufficient or necessary in accounting for the outcome of a mass shooting. Rather, configurations of causal conditions provide sufficient pathways and new insight into the particular circumstances under which a mass shooting is apt to take place in. The most salient of configurations tell us that mass shootings are prominently influenced by the combination of severe/multiple mental illnesses, a large number/high-powered guns and weak state gun law legislation. Another pathway reveals that mass shootings are also influenced by the interaction of radical ideology, severe/multiple mental illnesses, and high-state level gun ownership.