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Abstract
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Firearm possession rates across the United States are important for policy makers and the public alike, yet reliable data are notoriously hard to come by. In this issue of Patterns, Barak-Ventura et al. develop a model to estimate state-level firearm ownership and analyze the causal relationships among firearm possession, the occurrence of mass shootings, and media coverage.
Gun-related violence is widely considered a major threat to public health and safety in the United States, with a number of 45,222 firearm-related deaths reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020. Political proposals to contain this public health crisis often focus on stronger restrictions on the sale and purchase of firearms since gun-related injuries and deaths have been repeatedly correlated with firearm possession rates. Such proposals like the assault weapons ban of 20211 continue to be a major point of political controversy in the United States.2 To inform the political debate and to design effective policy, access to accurate and spatially resolved firearm possession data is therefore of major importance. However, due to illegal sales and the lack of a nationwide registry for firearm ownership, such data are not easily obtained, and researchers have to rely on proxy variables to estimate firearm possession rates across different states. These proxy variables range from self-reported survey data to the number of federal background checks and the number of suicides or homicides committed with guns. As none of these proxy variables is believed to capture firearm possession rates sufficiently well by itself,3 researchers often choose to combine several variables to arrive at more precise estimates of gun ownership...
Language: en |