National Research Collaborative Awards $7.5 Million in Grants To Study Gun Violence
Jul 30, 2020
Our Grants
This proposal aims to develop an analytic network process (ANP) model to collect information and measure the effect of gun polices and violence prevention intervention, on the interests of gun owners and users of guns. The approach can easily incorporate new information and changes in public sentiment.
Complete
This project puts forth a methodology for the collection and assembling of data that can be used to estimate the harms and benefits of various gun control policies to gun owners. The method we propose is feasible to implement with existing knowledge of the impact of gun control laws, and when data are not available it can incorporate expert judgment. Because gun control laws involve intangibles and hence not all impacts of a law are measurable in a quantitative scale, we need to compare the benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks (BOCR) created by each gun control law in relative terms. Thus, we need relative measurement as in the analytic network process. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the ANP model use pairwise comparisons to construct relative scales for both tangibles and intangibles. The gun control laws are then evaluated in terms of their BOCR scores.