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Abstract
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Since the massacre of children and educators in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, public concern and mobilization around the issues of gun violence and regulation has surged, and not only in connection with mass shootings. President Obama called for universal background checks to limit access to guns by dangerous people, and gun control briefly rose to the top of the congressional agenda. The proper regulation of firearms was a prominent issue in the 2016 presidential campaign, both the Democratic primary and the general election. Many states have recently amended their firearms regulations, in some cases to make them more stringent, in others less. Law enforcement agencies, most prominently in Chicago and other cities where gun violence rates have increased since 2015, are seeking innovative methods to reduce the use of guns in criminal violence (Police Foundation and Major Cities Chiefs Association 2017).
Reducing gun violence deserves a prominent place on the political agenda. In part, it is a matter of social justice. The high gun-violence rate that afflicts many low-income neighborhoods is not merely a symptom of underlying poverty and joblessness; it also degrades the quality of life (Cook and Ludwig 2000). Further, violence contributes to a vicious cycle that exacerbates out-migration, loss of community cohesion, struggling schools, and withdrawal of employment and investment--setting the stage for more violence.
When the five-city Moving to Opportunity experiment recruited mothers living in public housing, by far the most common reason the mothers gave for signing up was fear of crime: 75 percent endorsed that reason (Ludwig et al. 2013). Further, the strongest finding was that moving to more prosperous neighborhoods reduced stress and improved adult mental health, apparently because crime rates were lower. Not only does crime disproportionately affect troubled neighborhoods, it also affects the most socially and economically vulnerable Americans as it widens racial and ethnic disparities in population health. Among males age fifteen to twenty-four in the United States, homicide is the fourth leading cause of death for non-Hispanic whites and the second for Hispanics. Among black males in this age group, it is the leading cause of death and claims more lives than the nine other leading causes combined.1
Criminal misuse of firearms is a problem over and above the general problem of criminal violence. Not only are guns far more lethal than knives and clubs, they also have the unique quality of killing indiscriminately and at a distance. In neighborhoods afflicted by gun violence, no place is safe; children are kept inside and the sound of gunshots spreads terror. Greater gun availability is one explanation for why even though overall rates of violent crime are similar between the United States and Europe, America's homicide rate is much higher (Zimring and Hawkins 1997). Reducing gun involvement in violence would reduce the lethality and social costs of crime, even if the overall volume of crime were unchanged...
Language: en |