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Would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide? A review of international and some domestic evidence
... Les études réalisées dans ce domaine furent d'ailleurs souvent reprises dans la sphère publique pour alimenter les débats au sujet de l'interaction entre l'AAF, le citoyen et le criminel. Plusieurs chercheurs et décideurs politiques argumentent d'une part que ce ne sont pas les AAF qui seraient dangereuses, mais bien les gens qui les utilisent (Kleck, 1997;Lott, 2000;Kates et Mauser, 2007). Pour d'autres, l'AAF est au contraire un outil qui génère en luimême un potentiel assez important de violence, surtout lorsqu'utilisé par les criminels (Cook, 1981(Cook, , 1991Hemenway, 2004;Cook et Ludwig, 2006a). ...
... L'AAF n'est pas seulement un facilitateur aux actions criminelles ou violentes. Pour plusieurs, elle permet aux délinquants d'éviter les victimisations et aux citoyens de se défendre contre d'éventuelles attaques criminelles ou des invasions de domicile (Kleck et Delone, 1993;Kleck et Gertz, 1995;Kleck, 1998;Lott, 2000;Kates et Mauser, 2007). D'abord, l'autoprotection semble être un souci constant chez les délinquants (Wright et Rossi, 1986;Sheley et Wright, 1993;Sheley et Wright, 1995;Anderson, 1999). ...
... Une observation qui s'étend aussi aux victimes de viols, qui ont en toute probabilité beaucoup plus de chance de repousser leur agresseur lorsqu'une AFF est utilisée (Kleck et Gertz, 1995). Éventuellement, la prolifération de ces événements d'autodéfense serait également susceptible d'avoir un effet dissuasif sur la propension des criminels à attaquer des citoyens (Lott, 2000;Kates et Mauser, 2007). La multiplication des expériences vicariantes réduirait en ce sens la motivation des délinquants à s'attaquer aux victimes potentielles sachant qu'elles sont probablement armées (Stafford et Warr, 1993;Bandura, 1997;Kates et Mauser, 2007). ...
L’objectif de cet article est d’estimer la relation entre la disponibilité des armes à
feu et les homicides au Québec et au Canada entre 1974 et 2006. Cette production se distingue des recherches
préalablement réalisées en opérationnalisant des indicateurs de disponibilité reflétant, d’une
part, les armes légalement acquises et d’autre part, les armes obtenues par l’entremise des
voies illégales. Les analyses furent réalisées à l’aide d’analyses de séries chronologiques selon
une modélisation ARIMA. D’après les résultats, il demeure difficile d’établir l’ordre causal
des phénomènes, car peu de relations appuient la thèse selon laquelle la disponibilité des
armes à feu influe à la hausse le taux d’homicide, et peu de relations appuient la thèse selon
laquelle une hausse des homicides amène les individus à s’armer. La majorité des relations
significatives s’observent lorsque les deux phénomènes – disponibilité des armes à feu et
homicides – sont considérés au même temps de mesure. Les résultats suggèrent toutefois que
la disponibilité des armes prohibées est associée davantage aux problématiques émanant des
conflits entre bandes armées alors que la disponibilité des armes sans restriction entretiendrait
une relation plus générale avec les homicides. Les implications en termes de déplacement
tactique sont aussi abordées.
... This line of inquiry presents mixed results. Three separate literature reviews offer different conclusions, reporting that gun ownership is related to greater crime and violence (Hepburn & Hemenway, 2004); associated with no change or less crime and violence (Kates & Mauser, 2006); or that the literature is inconclusive (National Research Council, 2005). Kleck (2015) argues that these inconsistencies are partly attributable to substantial variation in the methodological rigor of studies. ...
Purpose
This study examines the relationship between state gun ownership rates and school firearm incidents (n = 1275) and injured/killed victims (n = 2026) of these incidents over a forty-year period (1980–2019). It also investigates whether child access prevention, minimum age requirements for gun purchases, and mandatory gun safety training laws are associated with fewer school firearm incidents and injured/killed victims.
Methods
Data were linked together from the School Shootings Database, State Firearm Law Database, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the US Census Bureau. State fixed effects and interrupted time series analyses were performed.
Results
State gun ownership rates declined between 1980 and 2019 while school firearm incidents generally ranged between 20 and 40 incidents before skyrocketing to 102 incidents in 2018 and 110 incidents in 2019. Findings were mixed on the relationship between state gun ownership rates and school firearm incidents and injured/killed victims. Additionally, child access prevention, minimum age requirements for gun purchases, and mandatory gun safety training laws exhibited weak and inconsistent relationships with school firearm incidents.
Discussion
Although access to firearms plays an undeniable role in school shootings, it remains unclear what policies are needed to reduce these incidents. Future research may be needed to explore holistic approaches to addressing this problem.
... Reducing firearm availability should, in turn, reduce the prevalence of guns used in violent crimes. However, to some observers, widespread access to guns induces a deterrent effect on criminal behavior as offenders' fear of confronting potentially armed victims should dissuade them from crime (Kates & Mauser 2006, Lott 2010. The proposed negative relationship between firearm availability and crime reduction (or "more guns, less crime") has been generally unsubstantiated when sound measurement and methodological strategies are utilized (Cook & Ludwig 2006a, Kleck 2015. ...
One of the central debates animating the interpretation of gun research for public policy is the question of whether the presence of firearms independently makes violent situations more lethal, known as an instrumentality effect, or whether determined offenders will simply substitute other weapons to affect fatalities in the absence of guns. The latter position assumes sufficient intentionality among homicide assailants to kill their victims, irrespective of the tools available to do so. Studies on the lethality of guns, the likelihood of injury by weapon type, offender intent, and firearm availability provide considerable evidence that guns contribute to fatalities that would otherwise have been nonfatal assaults. The increasing lethality of guns, based on size and technology, and identifiable gaps in existing gun control policies mean that new and innovative policy interventions are required to reduce firearm fatalities and to alleviate the substantial economic and social costs associated with gun violence.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 4 is January 13, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... gunman who killed 26 in a Texas church in November 2017 was shot by a neighbor with a gun). One particular article that suggested a correlation between higher rates of gun ownership and lower crime rates (Kates & Mauser, 2007), was later disputed on the grounds that the authors were gun rights advocates, that the paper was not peer-reviewed, and that the journal it appeared in (Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy) is self-described as 'one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation's leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship' (Fader, 2015). ...
Due to their potential influence on attitude and behavior toward a destination, perceived risk and its close correlate, perceived safety and security, have received ample research attention. Many studies have been conducted to identify the negative consequences of perceived risk factors such as crime, terrorism, disease, and natural disasters. Even though lenient gun laws are considered to be contributors to gun violence, their potential influence on traveler attitudes and behavior has been ignored by researchers. This study measured the perceived gun violence and other risk factors in a destination and how they influence tourists' perceptions and behaviors related to the destination, Florida, USA. Results reveal a significant and negative impact of gun violence on perceived safety, desirability, visitor satisfaction, and the likelihood of visiting Florida; however, the impact of gun violence is less important to visitors than Florida's image attributes are.
... Given the use of problematic and varying proxies for gun availability, it is hardly surprising that the corresponding studies provide a rather inconclusive picture. Some studies have found a significant relationship between gun availability and homicide (Hoskin 2001;Killias et al. 2001;Cook & Ludwig 2006) while others have not (Kleck & Patterson 1993;Kates & Mauser 2007). A more balanced view is taken by the recent comparative study of Altheimer and Boswell (2012), concluding that the relationship between gun availability, homicide, and gun homicide is not stable across nations but contingent upon cultural and sociohistorical factors. ...
In this contribution, we evaluate the effectiveness of firearm regulations in curbing the number of homicides and suicides committed both with and without firearms. We develop a gun control index that enables us to compare the restrictiveness of firearm regulations across time and space. We model the effects of gun control on figures of (gun) homicide and (gun) suicide gained from public health records in 16 West European countries between 1980 and 2010. We thus shift the analytical focus away from the United States, which can be considered an extreme case in many ways and analyze the effects of gun control in a least likely setting: a world region in which gun control is comparably strict to begin with. Our analysis demonstrates that stricter gun control entails a strong and robust negative effect not only on homicides and suicides committed with firearms, but also on overall homicide and suicide rates.
... Interestingly, these policy responses have been more likely to reduce gun control in Republican-led legislatures and provided no impact in Democrat-led legislatures [18]. From a societal perspective, the literature on gun control has been prolific, across research perspectives, to report the potential benefits of enhanced gun control regulation [19][20][21][22][23], though with noted exceptions about its potential widespread benefits [24]. From an individual perspective, blame around mass shootings is oftentimes defined by the individual's preconception around the gun control debate and actual firearm possession [25]. ...
Background
Increased interest about gun ownership and gun control are oftentimes driven by informational shocks in a common factor, namely violent attacks, and the perceived need for higher levels of safety. A causal depiction of the societal interest around violent attacks, gun control and gun purchase, both synchronous and over time, should be a stepping stone for designing future strategies regarding the safety concerns of the U.S. population.
Objective
Examine the causal relationships between unexpected increases in population interest about violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase.
Methods
Relationships among online searches for information about violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase occurring between 2004 and 2017 in the U.S. are explained through a novel structural vector autoregressive time series model to account for simultaneous causal relationships.
Results
More than 20% of the stationary variability in each of gun control and gun purchase interest can be explained by the remaining factors. Gun control interest appears to be caused, in part, by violent attacks informational shocks, yet violent attacks, although impactful, have a lesser effect than gun control debate on long-term gun ownership interests.
Conclusions
The form in which gun control has been introduced in public debate may have further increased gun ownership interest. Reactive gun purchase interest may be an unintended side effect of gun control debate. U.S. policymakers may need to rethink current approaches to promotion of gun control, and whether societal policy debate without policy outcomes could be having unintended effects.
... These data, which are not race-specific and are not publicly available for units smaller than very populous counties (i.e., populations ≥200,000), are drawn from the CDC WONDER database. While gun availability has traditionally maintained a weak positive or inverse relation with aggregate levels of violence (Kates & Mauser, 2001;Kleck, 1997;Lott, 2013;McDowall, 1986;Moody & Marvell, 2005), it nonetheless represents an important control that may confound the relation between subculture and gun violence (Kleck, 2004(Kleck, , 2015. Tests for multicollinearity between each of the contextual-level measures indicate that all variation inflation factors are under 2.9, well below the traditional acceptable threshold of 4.0. ...
Anderson’s thesis of a code of the street has been broadly applied to the study of violence, but race- and gender-specific multilevel analyses of gun violence are scant within the literature. An unresolved debate also
surrounds the link between violent victimization and adherence to street culture; underscored by an apparent reputation–victimization paradox among those who engage in street behaviors. The current study contributes
to the literature by assessing the direct influence of incident setting and victim–offender familiarity on the likelihood of gun use by Black males in the course of aggravated assaults; and the degree to which the confluence of these factors is conditioned by levels of disadvantage and violence in the community. To accomplish this, we apply hierarchical generalized linear modeling to incident-level data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System in conjunction with contextual-level data from the counties in which
the incidents are nested. Our findings suggest victim–offender familiarity and public settings are negatively associated with gun violence and the confluence of these factors further reduces the probability of gun use. This relationship, however, is conditioned by levels of disadvantage and violence in the community, providing preliminary evidence of both the violence increasing and decreasing effects of street culture hypothesized by Anderson.
... For instance, some believe that gun violence should be addressed through research, more restrictive regulation of firearms, and consumer education about the dangers of gun ownership (Kennedy 2016;Mozaffarian, Hemenway, and Ludwig 2013). Meanwhile, others argue that the problem should be addressed by focusing on related social issues, such as mental health, national security, and violent crime (see Agger and Luke 2015;Lott 2010), and still others maintain that gun violence will decrease if gun ownership increases (Kates and Mauser 2007). ...
Building on work on social and macro-social marketing, we provide an empirical account of ways in which American gun violence prevention groups (GVPGs) act as macro-social marketers as they address the wicked problem of gun violence, which they define as deaths and injuries with firearms. We find that, as a collective, GVPGs attempt to change the culture related to guns by targeting up-, mid-, and downstream agents. We contribute to theory by (1) expanding the concept of macro-social marketing beyond government entities to include consumer interest groups and collectives; (2) introducing internal marketing as a macrosocial marketing tool critical for macro-social marketers dependent largely on volunteers; (3) elucidating ways that macro-social marketers can accomplish upstream changes indirectly, by encouraging consumers and citizens to influence policy makers; and (4) revealing marketing tactics that can be leveraged across up-, mid-, downstream, and internal efforts.
One of the few legitimate functions of government is to protect property rights. That is one of the reasons why governments have been formed historically. When governments use force or threat of force to confiscate private property or prevent owners from using their property as they see fit, they cease to be legitimate. This chapter explores some instances where governments have abused their power by disparaging property rights and examines some of the ethical issues involved. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013. All rights are reserved.
The objective of this study was to provide a cultural transmission model that partially explains attitudes towards gun ownership and related behaviors. We utilized cross-sectional data collected from Chinese university students in two separate provinces. This paper specifically examines a cultural transmission model of Chinese attitudes towards gun ownership, carrying, purchasing guns for selfdefense, and beliefs regarding whether family and friends would own guns. Our model includes measures of attachment, commitment, belief, prior military service, feelings concerning safety in the presence of firearms, beliefs of the respondent regarding whether or not their close associates would own guns, age, gender, and residential location. Findings suggest that the cultural transmission model partially explains Chinese attitudes regarding gun ownership and related activities. © 2018 International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences (IJCJS).
This paper uses state-level data from 1984-96 to examine how right-to-carry laws and waiting periods affect the felonious deaths of police. Some people oppose concealed weapons carry laws because they believe these laws jeopardize law enforcement officials, who risk their lives to protect the citizenry. This paper strongly rejects this contention. States that allowed law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons had a slightly higher likelihood of having a felonious police death and slightly higher police death rates prior to the law. After enactment of the right-to-carry laws, states exhibit a reduced likelihood of having a felonious police death rate and slightly lower rates of police deaths. States that implement waiting periods have slightly lower felonious police death rates both before and after the law. Allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons does not endanger the lives of officers and may help reduce their risk of being killed.
Background
The Forty-Ninth World Health Assembly recenttly declared violence a worldwide public health problem. Improved understand of cross-national differences is useful for identifying risk factors and may facilitate prevention efforts. Few cross-national studies, however, have explored firearm-related deaths. We compared the incidence of firearm-related deaths among 36 countries.
Methods
Health officials in high-income (HI) and upper-middle-income countries (UMI) with populations greater than one million were asked to provide data using ICD-9 codes on firearm-related homicides, suicides, unintentional deaths and deaths of undetermined intent, as well as homicides and suicides for all methods combined. Thirty-six (78%) of the 46 countries provided complete data. We compared age-adjusted rates per 100 000 for each country and pooled rates by income group and geographical location.
Results
During the one-year study period, 88 649 firearm deaths were reported. Overall firearm mortality rates are five to six times higher in HI and UMI countries in the Americas (12.72) than in Europe (2.17), or Oceania (2.57) and 95 times higher than in Asia (0.13). The rate of firearm deaths in the United States (14.24 per 100 000) exceeds that of its economic counterparts (1.76) eightfold and that of UMI countries (9.69) by a factor of 1.5. Suicide and homicide contribute equally to total firearm deaths in the US, but most firearm deaths are suicides (71%) in HI countries and homicides (72%) in UMI countries.
Conclusions
Firearm death rates vary markedly throughout th industrialized world. Further research to identify risk factors associated with these variations may help improve prevention efforts.
Academics have long studied the basic dimensions of homicide, with Marvin E. Wolfgang's pioneering 1958 classic, Patterns in Criminal Homicide, defining the shape of criminological research on homicide. However, this research has generally contributed relatively little to practical homicide prevention strategies. Recently, problem-solving initiatives have undertaken homicide studies in particular cities with the goal of understanding homicide patterns and dynamics and crafting city-specific intervention strategies. One such initiative in Minneapolis found that a large component of the city's homicides was committed by and against chronic, gang-involved offenders. Particularly where youth homicide was concerned, the Minneapolis findings were very similar to recent findings regarding youth homicide in Boston. Based in part on these findings, a “pulling levers” strategy focused on deterring violent offending by gang members, and on reducing tensions between gangs, was designed and implemented. Although very preliminary, initial results from the Minneapolis intervention appear to be promising.
Few studies have addressed how child and adolescent murderers differ from aggressive youth who have not killed. This study had two novel aims concerning the psychopathology of such offenders. First, the prevalence and characteristics of psychotic symptoms in a sample of juvenile murderers with conduct disorder were examined in-depth. Second, these juvenile murderers were compared with violent inpatient youth with conduct disorders who had not committed murder. Juvenile murderers were significantly more likely to have experienced any psychotic symptom, paranoid ideation, and to have had previous court involvement. However, they were significantly less likely to have ever received mental health counseling. Their episodic psychotic symptoms were not due to major psychiatric illness, but instead appeared to have a multifactorial etiology consisting of constitutional, neurological, environmental, and cultural underpinnings. This study lends support for psychotic symptoms being a common neuropsychiatric risk factor for homicidal acts by violent youth with conduct disorder. Moreover, in spite of these juvenile murderers having long-standing and conspicuous emotional and behavioral disturbances antedating their crimes, they had not received needed mental health intervention.
This article employs newly available crime and vital statistics data from Russia to debunk two myths about violence in an international context. The first myth is that the United States is the most violent industrialized nation in the world. The second myth is that in spite of other problems associated with Soviet society, at least the totalitarian regime was able to maintain low rates of crime and violence. The newly available data reveal the inaccuracies in each of these statements. Not only is the current Russian homicide victimization rate more than 3 times higher than in the United States, but it has been comparable to or higher than the U.S. rate for at least the past 35 years. Furthermore, preliminary analyses of these data also question the generalizability of other commonly held notions about the production of high rates of violence in the United States.
This article seeks to examine the common view that widespread availability of firearms is a major cause, or even the principal cause, of high American rates of homicide. Reasonably accurate data as to both homicide rates and the acquisition and ownership of firearms in the United States are available back to the mid-1940s. These data do not show a correlation over the long term between the distribution of firearms in the population at large and homicide rates. The two variables do cross occasionally, but they do not do so consistently. Rather, the trend in the period 1973-1997 was one of very large increases in firearms accompanied by essentially flat, even diminishing, homicide rates. That is the general rule for the period since the end of World War II to date.