Publications
The National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research has funded 55 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 researchExtreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are civil court orders that prohibit firearm purchase and possession when someone is behaving dangerously and is at risk of harming themselves and/or others. As of June 2024, ERPOs are available in 21 states and the District of Columbia to prevent firearm violence. This paper describes the design and protocol of a six-state study of ERPO use.
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)Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) are civil restraining orders that aim to prevent firearm-related harm by temporarily separating firearms from people at high and imminent risk of harming themselves or others. The authors examined arrests for any crime, violent crimes, and firearm-related crimes among ERPO respondents over time in relation to the ERPO.
View researchThis 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.
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Data collection processes of fatal firearm violence are well established. These processes are far more fragmented for nonfatal firearm violence—specifically injuries sustained in the commission of a crime. Until recently, no national databases systemically tracked nonfatal gunshot wounds. This study aimed to enhance understanding of this subject by assessing concordance between measures of nonfatal firearm crimes from two national data sources: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report Summary Reporting System (UCR-SRS) and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
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 researchResearch on the effectiveness of comprehensive background check requirements for firearm purchases often finds individual-level associations that do not translate to the population level. However, few studies assess the effects of these policies on nonfatal firearm violence.
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.
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Explanations for police behavior argue that “us versus them” group dynamics shape officer interactions with the public. Yet, studies on racial disparities in policing overlook the interpersonal networks central to scholarship on group boundaries. This study integrates insights from the literature on networks, group identity, and intergroup relations to consider how social network size and racial composition affect racial disparities in police officer use of force, and how those social network effects are conditioned by officer race.
View researchIntimate 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.
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Community Violence Intervention (CVI) programs show promising results in reducing health disparities such as firearm injury and violence. However, the process by which these programs bring about positive change is less well known due to program variations and the focus of existing studies. To address this gap, this study used in-depth interview data focused on understanding the early engagement of participants in an east coast United States community violence intervention program (n = 32).
View research [subscription required]Background checks are the backbone of many policies designed to prevent firearm harm in the United States. This study highlights actionable ways in which states could make background check practices and policies more robust.
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While the U.S. has high quality data on firearm-related deaths, less information is available on those who arrive at trauma centers alive, especially those discharged from the emergency department. This study sought to describe characteristics of patients arriving to trauma centers alive following a firearm injury, postulating that significant differences in firearm injury intent might provide insights into injury prevention strategies.
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]Those with mobility disability are at increased risk of suicide compared with their non-disabled counterparts. Suicide using a firearm has increased among females in the last two decades. This study aims to describe and explore significant circumstantial variables (eg, socio-demographic, health indicators) preceding firearm suicide among females with mobility disability as compared with females without mobility disability.
View researchIn 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.
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How do measures of community distress differ for adult patients with motor vehicle– vs firearm-related injuries and what services do patients injured by firearms receive at discharge?
View researchNational-level data suggest that gun owners in the United States carry concealed weapons in public at growing rates. This research investigates whether these trends are associated with state adoption of more permissive concealed carry licensing laws between 2002-2019.
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.
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Credible messengers—individuals with lived experience of violence either as perpetrators or victims—are central to many community-based violence intervention (CVI) programs. Although the use of credible messengers as case managers in CVI programs is expanding, research is limited on what contributes to their effectiveness. This study examines the skills and traits credible messengers utilize to engage participants and support behavior change.
View research [subscription required]This qualitative study examined patterns among individuals subject to law enforcement-filed ERPOs in Washington State who intersect with arrest and involuntary transportation for behavioral health evaluation, and how these intervention pathways relate to ERPO outcomes.
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.
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Firearm relinquishment laws aim to prevent intimate partner homicide, yet enforcement remains fragmented and underresourced. Drawing on 25 stakeholder interviews conducted in California in 2021 and 2024 to 2025, this study examined implementation challenges related to domestic violence restraining orders and gun violence restraining orders and explored how recent federal funding cuts have impacted survivor access to legal protection.
View research (subscription required)The 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.
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Using more than 25 years of longitudinal multicohort data from Chicago, 1994–2021, this study shows that pathways of concealed gun carrying are distinct between adolescence and adulthood. Adolescent carrying is often age-limited and responsive to direct exposure to gun violence (witnessing and victimization), while adult carrying is a persistent behavior that is less tied to direct exposure.
View researchThis 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.
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School violence is a widespread public health issue affecting youth in the U.S. To help address this problem, this study examined the effectiveness of the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation’s Know the Signs program on positive school climate indicators and youth developmental outcomes in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
View research (subscription required)This 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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Firearm violence is a leading cause of death among U.S. children under age 18. Urban vegetation, a vital component of the living environment, has been found to influence firearm violence, yet the relationship between different types of street vegetation and firearm violence with children as the victim at the microgeographic scale remains unclear.
View researchChicago’s homicide arrest rate dropped from 91% in 1965 to 57% in 1994 and dropped still lower in recent years. This pattern mirrors the trend in the national homicide clearance rate. A plausible explanation for this great decline is the trend in homicide case mix, which arguably has made it intrinsically more difficult to solve homicide cases. This analysis describes the change in case mix for the period 1965 to 2020 and analyzes the effect on the arrest rate for the first 30 years of this period, all by use of a unique homicide case microdata set.
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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]Using a standardized protocol, this study abstracted ERPO petitions and associated court documents from 6 states to examine characteristics of respondents, documented risks of harm, and court outcomes. Included cases were filed through June 30, 2020, from 2013 (Connecticut) or from when the law went into effect (California: 2016; Colorado: 2020; Florida: 2018; Maryland: 2018; and Washington: 2016).
View researchThis study aimed to understand how the implementation and enforcement of universal background check (UBC) laws may influence the use of background checks during private party firearm transfers in the USA.
View researchMass 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 researchHandgun purchaser licensing (HPL) laws mandate individuals to obtain a license from law enforcement before buying a firearm. Research indicates these laws effectively reduce various forms of fatal firearm violence, including homicides, suicides, and mass shootings. This study sought to assess the impact of HPL laws on non-fatal firearm violence.
View researchThis policy brief utilizes pooled data from the Gun Violence module of the 2021 and 2022 California Health Interview Surveys (CHIS) to provide information about risks and fear of firearm victimization among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations in California.
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 researchLatino and Asian immigrants represent the two largest immigrant populations in California, yet little is known about firearm ownership and storage practices among individuals in these groups. This policy brief explores firearm ownership and storage practices among Latino and Asian adults in California. Using the 2021 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), this brief reports findings by self-reported citizenship status among adult respondents ages 18 years and older.
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 collected all (N = 4,695) Florida risk protection order (RPO) cases filed from March 2018 (when the policy was enacted) to June 2020 and coded a random sample (n = 2,406) to examine how RPOs have been implemented in Florida, a state that has granted substantially more RPO cases than any other state analyzed thus far.
View researchMost Americans believe that gun-free zones make locations more vulnerable to violent crimes, particularly active shootings. However, there is no empirical evidence regarding the impact of gun-free zones on protecting locations from violence. The objective of this study was to estimate the association between gun-free zones and active shootings.
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 researchUsing firearm transaction and crime gun recovery records from California (2010–2021), we employ machine learning to identify dealers who sold largest number and highest fraction of guns recovered in crimes within 1 year of sale. This short “time-to-crime” (TTC) is a well-established indicator of potential illegal activity by dealers or traffickers.
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 researchFirearm injury remains a public health problem, with nearly 50,000 firearm-related deaths in the US in 2021. Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) are civil restraining orders that intend to reduce firearm deaths by temporarily removing firearms from individuals who are threatening violence to themselves or others. This article describes ERPO use by petitioner type and implementation including firearm removal.
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 researchFor over two decades, violence has been understood as a public health problem. Despite a well-established and applicable public health framework, progress to address the entrenched violence that plagues many cities has been slow. This article describes an initiative to address one aspect of violence plaguing Wilmington: access to and possession of guns.
View researchA lack of awareness of state gun laws or the erroneous belief that these laws are not in force could mean that the laws do not have their intended impact. This scenario is especially pertinent when the knowledge of gun laws is likely integral to behavioral change. Previous research has assessed public support for gun laws but not people’s knowledge of specific gun laws that are in force in their state of residence.
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To reduce the risk of injury to civilians, most police agencies authorize the use of various less-lethal weapons. However, to date, there is little consensus as to which types of less-lethal weapons are most effective at reducing injury risk. This study tests the differential effects of less-lethal weapons on civilian injury and injury severity using data on 2348 use-of-force incidents originating from 17 large urban and metropolitan law enforcement agencies from 2015 to 2019.
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 cross-sectional retrospective study of females who died by firearm suicide between January 2014 and December 2018 used state-based surveillance data from the National Violent Death Reporting System Restricted Access Database representing 1 or more years of data from all 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. A latent class analysis was used to identify and characterize categories of mental and physical health-related factors among females (ie, classes).
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 researchExtreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are civil court orders that temporarily restrict firearm access for people at risk of harming themselves or others. In some cases, courts mandate respondents to complete a behavioral health evaluation (BHE), which may create an opportunity to connect people with unmet behavioral health needs to behavioral health services. However, little is known about how often these evaluations are ordered, what factors shape these decisions, or how judges explain their reasoning when a BHE is not ordered. This mixed-methods study examined patterns in court-ordered BHEs among granted ERPOs in Washington State from 2017–2023.
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.
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Women experiencing physical or repeated psychological intimate partner violence (IPV) were recruited from the community and completed daily app-based surveys for 90 days, in which they reported their partner’s use of alcohol, cannabis, and other drugs, and their partner’s psychological, physical, and sexual IPV perpetration.
View research [subscription required]How are firearms diverted from the legal retail market into the hands of gun offenders? With close to 8 million legal firearm transaction records in California (2010–2020) linked to over 380,000 records of recovered crime guns (2010–2021), we employ supervised machine learning to predict which firearms are used in crimes shortly after purchase.
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The American College of Surgeons (ACS) Committee on Trauma utilized the Trauma Quality Improvement Project (TQIP) infrastructure to pilot a data surveillance strategy to capture more complete data on firearm injuries in all patients presenting to participating hospitals. The objective of the ACS Firearm Study was to describe the patient and injury characteristics and the pre-event, firearm, and event-related factors associated with firearm injuries.
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The authors conducted a nationally representative organizational survey of 800 US law enforcement agencies to estimate the number of violence against officers incidents, including suspects shooting officers, and with other weapons or bodily force, in the past five years.
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 researchTracking the movement of firearms from legal purchase to use in crimes can help inform prevention of firearm injuries and deaths. The last state-wide studies analyzing crime gun recoveries used data from over 20 years ago; thus, an update is needed.
View researchThis dissertation explores underutilized data sources and novel theories to conceptualize and operationalize structural racism.
View researchExtreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) are used to disarm individuals making threats of interpersonal harm, but little is known about respondents’ pre- and post-order criminal behavior. This study sought to quantify ERPO respondents’ rate of arrest vis-à-vis timing of the order.
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).
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Decades of research shows that drug markets are a robust predictor of city- and neighborhood-rates of gun violence. Further, mounting evidence suggests they produce spillovers of violence into spatially proximate areas. Whether this spillover effect applies to neighborhoods that are spatially distant is currently unknown. This study fills this critical gap by examining the influence of drug market activity on gun violence across a “network of neighborhoods” connected by routine movement of neighborhood residents in Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia.
View researchThis study’s objective was to describe county-specific frequency and rate of ERPO petitioning by respondent demographics across Florida’s first 3.8 years of policy implementation.
View researchTheft is widely recognized as an important source of guns to offenders, yet direct evidence remains limited. Using linked California administrative records (2010–2021) on firearm transactions, thefts, and crime recoveries, this study examines characteristics associated with reported theft and, among stolen guns, predictors of recovery in crime.
View researchFor 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.
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This study examines the relative likelihood of police officer firearm use and severity of subject injury in officer encounters with subjects in mental health crises (MHC) and those not in mental health crises (nMHC). The study sample is from a dataset of officer involved shootings (OIS) and officer use of force (UOF) incidents from 26 large law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the U.S.
View research [subscription required]Does the risk of suicide change for women when someone they live with in a previously handgun-free household lawfully acquires a handgun?
View researchMore than half of suicide deaths in the United States result from self-inflicted firearm injuries. Extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws in 21 states and the District of Columbia temporarily limit access to firearms for individuals found in a civil court process to pose an imminent risk of harm to themselves or others. Research with large multistate study populations has been lacking to determine effectiveness of these laws. This study assembled records pertaining to 4,583 ERPO respondents in California, Connecticut, Maryland, and Washington.
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)Crime Gun Intelligence Centers (CGICs) are organized around the investigation of repeat shooting events that are connected through intelligence derived from the National Integrative Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN). This study investigates the potential of the Detroit CGIC to increase clearance rates for fatal and nonfatal shooting cases with NIBIN leads.
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Early police ethnographies suggest that officers are shaped by the colleagues around them. Officers’ workplace networks, including friendships, and routine day-to-day interactions are theorized to serve as key channels through which behaviors such as use of force spread. Yet, few studies have directly traced how these networks transmit force-related behaviors. To address this gap, this study mapped the workplace friendship ties of more than 1,500 officers in a large US police department, then asked whether officers’ firearm use is shaped by the colleagues they consider close friends.
View researchThis 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.
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Understanding the effectiveness and contexts of defensive gun use (DGU) in preventing injury during violent incidents is critical for informing public safety policies and injury prevention practices. This dissertation addresses critical gaps in the literature by (i) systematically examining risk factors associated with interpersonal violence involving DGU, and (ii) evaluating the efficacy of DGU – and defensive weapon use (DWU) more broadly – in mitigating victim injuries across varying offender scenarios and historical contexts.
View research 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 identifies the challenges and benefits of leveraging data systems managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives toward calculating time-to-first shooting (TTFS), a more accurate firearm trafficking indicator than time-to-crime (TTC).
View research [subscription required]This paper demonstrates the existence of context-specific spam and builds models to automatically identify both context-specific and traditional spam using only post data on Twitter.
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 explores the responses of 357 African American men between 15- and 24-years old living in four high crime high violence cities to better understand their perception of their environment and its impact on community violence.
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 OSFThis cohort study, which combines information about the suicide methods used by handgun-owning suicide decedents in California, the lethality of different suicide methods, and the distribution of suicide deaths among ERPO respondents in Connecticut, found that 1 suicide death was prevented for every 22 ERPOs issued.
View researchn the last decade, a lot of research has been done on developing fairness metrics to measure algorithmic bias and proposing bias mitigation algorithms to improve fairness. However, these approaches do not work equally well on different types of prediction tasks or under certain constraints. In this dissertation, we aim to explore some of these tasks and identify which type of strategy is the best to improve model fairness for each task.
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This study compared fatal police shootings in three commonly used open sources to self-reports from a national sample of 573 U.S. police agencies from 2015 to 2019. Using ANOVA and regression methods, authors assessed patterns of agreement and discrepancy by open source, year, and agency characteristics, and examined media reports to assess factors contributing to overcounts in open sources.
View researchExtreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) are a tool used to temporarily remove access to firearms from those who may pose a risk of violence to themselves or others. Little research on ERPOs has examined variation in use of the law between urban and rural jurisdictions.
View researchProtest 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.
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Despite a growing body of research examining the causes and correlates of gun violence, less attention has focused on examining these factors among actively gun-carrying youth. This study addresses this gap by assessing the role of individual and environmental predictors of gun violence among a sample of adjudicated youth and a subsample who actively carry firearms.
View research View research on OSFThis 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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