Publications
The National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research has funded 51 research projects, including 13 dissertation and seven postdoctoral awards. Research topics include suicide, violent crime, school violence, police shootings, firearm safety, defensive gun use and non-lethal firearm injuries. The findings from those projects are listed here once publicly available.
Explore published findings from research projects funded by the collaborative.
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What causes adverse policing outcomes, such as excessive uses of force and unnecessary arrests? Prevailing explanations focus on problematic officers or deficient regulations and oversight. Here, we introduce a new, overlooked perspective. We suggest that the cognitive demands inherent in policing can undermine officer decision-making.
View researchThis study considers self-harm repetition risk factors by using an incident user design to examine case fatality at index self-harm events and each repeat event by method, describes method-switching, and identifies factors associated with repetition of self-harm.
View research (subscription required)In order for social scientists to use social media as a source for understanding human behavior and public opinion, they need to understand the demographic characteristics of the population participating in the conversation. What proportion are female? What proportion are young? While previous literature has investigated this problem, this work presents a larger scale study that investigates inference techniques for predicting age and gender using Twitter data.
View researchThis paper discusses machine learning fairness when data contains biases in the form of selection bias and/or missing values exist.
View researchUnderstanding the social contexts of violent crime remains controversial in the literature. This study examines common social contexts in four cities (Houston, TX, Baltimore, MD, Jackson, MS, Wilmington, DE). Data were examined in two studies. In the first, each city was compared to national county-level data on health outcomes. In the second, communities within the four cities were examined for correlates of crime.
View research (subscription required)This paper presents a spatiotemporal model that predicts firearm prevalence at the resolutions of one state and one month from the numbers of background checks and suicides committed with a firearm. Drawing on principles from econometrics, the model also accounts for interactions between states. The model’s output is challenged in causal analysis, which uncovers unprecedented associations between firearm prevalence, media output on firearm regulations, and mass shootings.
View researchThis study aimed to contribute toward the goal of establishing a foundation for how social media data may best be used, alone or in conjunction with other data resources, to improve the information base for firearm research.
View researchIn this cross-sectional study of 1227 patients, coding accuracy of firearm injury incidents at 3 level I US trauma centers was assessed using case-level data for 2008 to 2019. The results showed that 28% of all emergency department visits for assault-related firearm injuries were miscoded as firearm accidents in hospital discharge data.
View researchFirearms are used in about half of U.S. suicides. This study investigated how various medical diagnoses are associated with firearm and nonfirearm suicide.
View researchThis study examines whether Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System measures of household gun ownership are correlated with firearm suicide, non-firearm suicide, and total suicide rates, for Black and for White adults, and repeat these assessments with select proxies.
View research [PDF]Intimate partner violence (IPV) and intimate partner homicide (IPH) are complex global problems. Transdisciplinary research approaches offer the potential to increase the understanding of these events and inform best practices for prevention.
View researchSince 2005, female firearm suicide rates increased by 34%, outpacing the rise in male firearm suicide rates over the same period. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a natural language processing pipeline to identify a select set of common and important circumstances preceding female firearm suicide from coroner/medical examiner and law enforcement narratives.
View research (subscription required)This study aims to assess how much, if at all, firearm storage practices changed as a result of Child Access Prevention Negligent Storage (CAP-NS) laws.
View research [PDF]In this cross-sectional study using a total of 2684 cases of firearm injury, a natural language processing model was developed using free-text notes in the electronic health record to assign intent to firearm injury incidents in patients presenting to emergency departments.
View researchThe PHDCN+ is a continuation of a multi-cohort interdisciplinary longitudinal study that began in the mid-1990s that was designed to unite the longitudinal study of individual lives with social context, especially neighborhoods, families, peers, schools, and the criminal justice system.
View researchExtreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are a relatively new type of law that are being considered or implemented in many states in the United States. Colorado’s law went into effect on January 1, 2020, after significant controversy and concern over potential misuse of the law to confiscate weapons; many (n = 37 of 64) counties declared themselves “2nd Amendment (2A) sanctuaries” and said they would not enforce the law.
View researchThis paper models county-level changes in firearm mortality rates (total, homicide, and suicide) from 1989 to 1993 vs 2015 to 2019 and identifies and characterizes hot spots showing unexpected changes over time.
View researchThe 2021 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) included questions about guns in the home and fears of gun violence, asked of California adults and of adolescents ages 12 to 17. This fact sheet focuses on the resulting estimates about guns and gun safety at home, as well as attitudes related to gun violence among adults in California.
View research [PDF]Intimate partner violence (IPV) victims and perpetrators often report suicidal ideation, yet there is no comprehensive national dataset that allows for an assessment of the connection between IPV and suicide. The authors developed and validated a tool that detects mentions of IPV circumstances (yes/no) for single suicides in NVDRS death narratives.
View researchThis study aimed to develop a machine learning model of individual-level firearm ownership from social media data and assess the criterion validity of a state-level construct of ownership.
View researchThe incidence of domestic violence may have increased since March 2020 due to Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic mitigation strategies, such as shelter-in-place policies that asked citizens with non-essential jobs to stay at home to curb the spread of the virus. As a result,trend analyses are necessary in order to uncover if incidents of domestic violence have indeed increased in the recent year.
View research [PDF]This study estimated the effect of the implementation of comprehensive background check (CBC) policies on state-level firearm homicide and suicide rates in states implementing CBC policies from 2013 to 2015 (Colorado, Delaware, Oregon, and Washington).
View researchResearchers review and critique a study addressing the question of whether a civil restraining order that temporarily remove guns from people behaving dangerously has had any detectable effect on firearm injury and mortality in San Diego County.
View researchThis report presents the results of an evaluation of the development and implementation of the Detroit Police Department's Crime Gun Intelligence Center.
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Nineteen states have laws on the books to temporarily prohibit gun purchase and possession by people who are behaving dangerously and at risk of committing violence, including self-harm. However, early evidence indicates that few clinicians are aware of how to use this emerging legal tool to prevent violence.
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Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) allow a court to restrict firearm access for individuals at imminent risk of harm to self/others. Little is known about ERPOs use for older adults, a population with higher rates of suicide and dementia.
View research (subscription required)Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), also known as red flag laws, are a potential tool to prevent firearm violence, including mass shootings, but little is currently known about the extent of their use in cases of mass shooting threats or about the threats themselves. This study collected and abstracted information from ERPO cases from six states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, and Washington).
View research [subscription required]Mass shootings perpetrated by shooters seeking fame are the most lethal and, likely, the least understood. Fame is sought in many ways, such as attempting to be deadlier or leaving behind manifestos for the public to read. Here, we apply the information-theoretic concept of “surprisal” to elucidate the modus operandi of fame-seekers.
View research [subscription required]This study used the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) to do a descriptive assessment of demographic and health-related characteristics of female firearm suicides. Data were collected through interviews of survivors as well as extracted from Coroner or Medical Examiner/Law Enforcement reports from NVDRS-reporting states from 2014–2018.
View researchSince many policies impacting firearm use and ownership are initiated at the state level, it is important to understand state-specific prevalence of firearm access and firearm storage practices and their intersection with mental health risk factors for suicide. This understanding can inform clinical, public health, and policy efforts to prevent firearm suicides among California’s veteran population.
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Firearm deaths continue to be a major public health problem, but the number of non-fatal firearm injuries and the characteristics of patients and injuries is not well known. The American College of Surgeons leveraged an existing data system to capture lethal and non-lethal injuries, including patients treated and discharged from the emergency department and collect additional data on firearm injuries that present to trauma centers. This cross-sectional study examined the characteristics of patients from Missouri with firearm injuries.
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While firearm injuries and deaths continue to be a major public health problem, the number of non-fatal firearm injuries and the characteristics of patients is not well known. This study leveraged an existing data system to collect additional data on fatal and non-fatal firearm injuries presenting to trauma centers. This report provides an overview of this initiative and highlights the challenges associated with capturing actionable data on firearm-injured patients.
View researchThis paper estimates the proportion of adults in gun-owning households who have discussed firearm safety with a clinician and characterizes the content of these discussions.
View researchThis article examines the research on variations in firearm owner choice of locking devices. Findings highlight the importance of enhancing the specificity of interventions that promote safe firearm storage practices.
View researchHas implementation of the gun violence restraining order law, beginning in 2016, been associated with a reduction in firearm assault or firearm self-harm in San Diego County, California?
View researchThis study estimated the association between living with a lawful handgun owner and risk for homicide victimization. This retrospective cohort study followed 17.6 million adult residents of California for up to 12 years.
View researchThis study aimed to identify U.S. states that showed unexpected decreases and increases in firearm homicide rates and summarise their firearm policy changes in the last three decades.
View researchThis study aimed to identify suicide rates by occupation category in Utah and describe the hospital history and circumstances of suicide decedents in the occupation category that had the state's highest rate and highest number of suicides: Construction and Extraction.
View research (subscription required)This study aimed to leverage a large language model approach to identify infrequent circumstances preceding female firearm suicide in the unstructured coroners or medical examiners and law enforcement narrative reports available in the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS).
View researchIncreasing suicide rates across the United States are disproportionate among populations most impacted by mass incarceration. This study aimed to determine if incarceration is associated with risk of suicide and firearm suicide after release from prison.
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Did the likelihood of being shot, seeing someone shot, or living near firearm violence vary by race, sex, and birth cohort over the life course during the past three decades?
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Intimate partner violence (IPV) is associated with suicidal ideation, yet it remains unclear how often IPV precipitates suicide mortality. To overcome limitations with national data, this study applied novel methods to: (1) document the prevalence of IPV-related suicide in the USA and (2) identify correlates for IPV-related suicide.
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This cross-sectional study found that intimate parter violence (IPV) contributed to more violent deaths in the US than previously reported; nearly 1 in 10 violent deaths had IPV circumstances.
View researchA case study in bringing diverse stakeholders, particularly gun owners, together to find common ground on firearm suicide prevention and in using linked data to support their efforts.
View research (subscription required)This study suggests that passively collected administrative data on handgun transactions may be used to inform targeted interventions based on risk stratification.
View researchUsing qualitative interview data and survey data, we explored what if anything Missouri gun owners knew about the Second Amendment Preservation Act and what they perceived its effects would be on gun-related murders, suicides, gun thefts, and mass shootings.
View researchThe purpose of this study is to describe the creation, implementation, activities and rationale for the Area Technology Centers (ATCs), an innovation adopted by the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD’s) Bureau of Detectives (BoD) in 2019 for the purpose of supporting investigations of crimes of serious violence by deploying specialized teams of officers to gather and process video and digital evidence.
View research (subscription required)This paper uses parent-adolescent dyads to describe the relationship between adolescent access to household firearms and parental storage practices and the discordance between what parents think about their child’s access and the child’s self-reported access.
View researchThis paper discusses risk perceptions and storage practices.
View researchThis is the first paper to describe and compare Black vs White household gun ownership patterns.
View researchThis paper introduces Legal Firearm Prevalence (LFP), a direct behavioral measure based on the population of firearm licensees in Massachusetts. LFP is not directly measurable in most firearm markets, so this research tests candidate proxies for LFP in several common research designs, finding that firearm acquisitions are the best proxy in every research design tested.
View researchThis dissertation explores underutilized data sources and novel theories to conceptualize and operationalize structural racism.
View researchThe authors consider how social media data have been used in firearms research to date and how they can be best used moving forward. Despite the many advantages of using social media data, there are key analytical and ethical considerations associated with their use, including understanding the underlying population, constructing valid and reliable measures from shared content, the possibility of false data and misinformation through fake accounts, and concerns having to do with the privacy and consent of social media users.
View researchThis paper considers challenges associated with using social media data and the ethical considerations these challenges create, framing the ethical dilemmas within the context of data privacy and algorithmic bias (fairness).
View research [PDF]For social media related machine learning tasks, having reliable data labelers is important. However, it is unclear whether students or Mechanical Turk workers would be better data labelers on these noisy, short posts. This paper compares the reliability of students and Mechanical Turk workers for a series of social media data labeling tasks.
View research on OSFDoes the risk of suicide change for women when someone they live with in a previously handgun-free household lawfully acquires a handgun?
View researchThis study describes the alignment of medical diagnoses with life circumstances by identifying suicide typologies among decedents. Demographics, stressful life events, suicidal behavior, perceived and diagnosed health problems, and suicide method contributed to the typologies.
View researchLarge-scale organic data generated from newspapers, social media, television, and radio require an expertise in infrastructure management, data collection, and data processing in order to gain research value from them. This paper describes development of text analytic research portals to help social science researchers who do not have the resources necessary to collect, store, and process these large-scale data sets.
View research (subscription required)There have been no peer-reviewed, quantitative research studies on the effectiveness of gun-free school zones. The objective of this study was to use a cross-sectional, multi-group controlled ecological study design in St. Louis, MO, city that compared the counts of crimes committed with a firearm occurring in gun-free school zones compared to a contiguous area immediately surrounding the gun-free school zone (i.e., gun-allowing zones) in 2019.
View researchThis study examined the extent to which engagement with firearm means safety messaging is conditional based on type of messaging, political beliefs, past suicidal ideation, and implicit associations of firearms with safety or danger.
View research [PDF]The study describes the three year hospital visit histories of suicide decedents in Utah grouped by the suicide method they used.
View research (subscription required)This dissertation examines how firearm availability impacts the risk of firearm violence, and evaluates community-level interventions through zoning regulations on firearm dealers and individual-level intervention via targeted prohibitions among those at high risk of harming others or themselves.
View research on OSFThis study sought to quantify the separate and joint relations of community firearm and alcohol availability with individual-level risk of (fatal and nonfatal) firearm self-harm.
View researchThis study assessed specific points of intervention to reduce firearm-related harm by characterizing patterns of handgun carrying by youths in rural communities from early adolescence to young adulthood and to quantify how age at initiation, duration, and frequency of carrying differ across identified patterns.
View researchIn this study, the authors assemble a unique dataset that combines records for over 380,000 crime guns recovered by law enforcement in California (2010–2021), and more than 126,000 guns reported stolen, linked to in-state legal handgun transactions (1996–2021), to describe local and statewide crime gun trends and investigate several potentially important sources of guns to criminals, including privately manufactured firearms (PMFs), theft, and “dirty” dealers.
View researchThis study examines the reasons for gun-carrying among 103 young people, primarily Black men, in Brooklyn, New York.
View researchThis article contributes to our national understanding of gun violence by incorporating in our analyses the perspectives of the young men most likely to be victims and/or perpetrators of gun violence in urban areas.
View researchThis paper demonstrates that multiple imputation by super learning (MISL) can be used to assess intent-specific nonfatal firearm injuries in the CDC's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS). Intent distributions derived using MISL differ from those derived under the assumption data are missing completely at random.
View research (subscription required) View research on OSFProtest movements linked to racial inequality in policing and antigovernment sentiment have roiled the United States in recent years. In this visualization, the authors examine how race, support for Black Lives Matter (BLM), and gun ownership predict views about the political uprising of January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.
View researchThis paper examines National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) data from 2015–2017 for five US states that supplied information on gun owner in firearm suicides.
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