Citation

Chaudhary MJ, Zakrison TL, Richardson J. JAMA Surg. 2024; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, American Medical Association)

DOI

10.1001/jamasurg.2024.1644

PMID

38837132

Abstract

Public health firearm research often focuses on individual "risk factors" for being injured or killed by a gun.1 Such a paradigm elides the deeper, structural forces--such as the spatial and racial distribution of resources, the geographic operation of the police and carceral state, and the informal economic systems--that condition these risk factors.1 One may consider being Black, male, and living in an urban low-income zip code as "risk factors" possessed by an individual that makes them highly likely to experience firearm violence. However, this approach fails to consider the broader forces that pattern this risk. Poulson et al2 challenge this traditional public health framework by using structural equation modeling to describe an association between firearm deaths and carceral state exposure in racialized communities in Chicago, Illinois. Challenging the cultural dogma that incarceration reduces violent crime and thus firearm homicides,3 Poulson et al show that, in fact, increasing rates of incarceration in Chicago's Black communities are associated with increased rates of firearm homicide--an association that fails to hold for other racial groups. While they demonstrate this association and its mediation by single-parent households, temporal causation remains in question. Poulson et al used structural equation modeling to examine the association between observed and latent variables, using the number of firearm homicides in Chicago from 2001 to 2019 as the outcome and the 2018 percentage of incarcerated individuals per census block as the exposure. The primary statistical challenge still remains ascertaining causality. Is it possible that increased rates of firearm homicide from 2001 onwards led to increased police surveillance, carceral intervention, and thus incarceration in these communities by 2018?...

Language: en