Crime and Violence Prevention

The 2013 State of the Union address will likely be remembered for its impassioned call for greater gun control just two months removed from the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. However, President Obama's second-term agenda can perhaps best be characterized by its sheer breadth, reflecting the broad range of policy challenges facing the United States today.

If policymakers are to craft effective solutions to these complex issues, the discussion must begin with research that is objective, nonpartisan, and rigorous.

President Obama's task force on gun violence released its findings yesterday, raising the stakes in the policy debate on gun control and policy in the wake of the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. The mix of legislative proposals and executive actions includes measures to improve background checks for firearm purchasers, trace guns used in criminal acts, ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and improve access to mental health services. The horrific attack at Sandy Hook has stimulated a national conversation on guns and the role that policies can play in reducing gun violence in the United States, but the problem of gun violence is larger and much more complex than mass shootings.

How big is the problem of firearm-related deaths in the United States?

Guns claim the lives of thousands of people in America every year. In 2010, according to data (PDF) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 31,000 people were killed by guns in the United States.

Many policymakers and commentators in the media have suggested that mental health care has a substantial role to play in reducing gun violence. Indeed, one of the prominent criticisms of the recently announced presidential plan to address gun violence is that it focuses efforts too much on guns and not enough of mental illness. Unfortunately, those suggesting that mental health treatment is the key to preventing gun crimes often mischaracterize the current state of the science in two ways.

First, commentators have widely assumed that psychiatric disorders are good predictors of gun violence and causally related to that violence. While there is some limited evidence in the literature that psychiatric disorders are associated with violence, that empirical association is weak and not generalizable across disorders. It is plausible that perceived connections are the result of shared risk factors (e.g., prior trauma exposure) rather than a causal effect of mental health. Specifically, the very limited research investigating this association has found weak correlations, suggesting that psychiatric diagnoses may not be useful for real-world predictions of who will be violent.

This letter to the editor appeared in The Washington Post on January 4, 2013.

I compliment The Post for shedding light on the National Rifle Association's successful suppression of federal funding for gun-violence-prevention research 17 years ago and on its recent success at inserting language into legislation designed to discourage doctors from counseling patients about the danger of keeping loaded firearms [“In health-care law, a victory for NRA,” front page, Dec. 31].

As one who researched this issue two decades ago, long before I joined the RAND Corp., I assure Post readers that my two most important studies of guns in the home did, in fact, take into account factors that can increase the risk of violent death. These included: victim's age, race, gender and neighborhood; whether the victim lived alone; whether the victim graduated from high school; whether the victim abused alcohol and/or illicit drugs; and whether anyone in the household was previously arrested or was previously hit or hurt in a fight in the home.

This commentary appeared on Health Affairs Blog on December 21, 2012.

The horrific massacre of 27 children and adults in Newtown, Connecticut ranks second only to Virginia Tech among U.S. mass shootings. These tragedies are part of a lengthening list of mass killings in such varied places as a shopping mall, a movie theater, a Sikh Temple, a high school, a congressional constituent meeting, and a military base. But this one was different. Not only were the death toll particularly high and the killings particularly savage; the killer's victims were first-grade students, teachers and school staff.

Millions are deeply touched by this tragedy, but few of us can fathom the shock and grief felt by the survivors, parents, family members and friends of those who died. Our first concern must be to comfort them and support what will likely be a long and difficult recovery. But few people are prepared to stop with that. This event, unlike its predecessors, has sparked a movement to challenge the inevitability of mass shootings, not to mention the thousands of individual gun homicides that occur each year in the United States.

This commentary appeared on The Journal of the American Medical Association on December 21, 2012.

On December 14, a 20-year-old Connecticut man shot and killed his mother in the home they shared. Then, armed with 3 of his mother's guns, he shot his way into a nearby school, where he killed 6 additional adults and 20 first-grade children. Most of those who died were shot repeatedly at close range. Soon thereafter, the killer shot himself. This ended the carnage but greatly diminished the prospects that anyone will ever know why he chose to commit such horrible acts.

In body count, this incident in Newtown ranks second among US mass shootings. It follows recent mass shootings…

The remainder of this op-ed can be found at jama.jamanetwork.com.

At a recent Capitol Hill rally for the administration's job creation bills, Vice President Joe Biden urged America to hire more police — even in this era of austerity — or accept that crime will increase.

His point is worth considering. Although crime in the United States on average has shown a historic decline since the early 1990s, a recent RAND Corp. report shows that a 10% increase in the size of a police force decreases the rate of homicide by 9%, robbery by 6% and vehicle theft by 4% each year. (The effect on rates of sexual assault is less clear.)