Breaking News: Guns and Violence

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Firearm purchaser licensing laws that require an in-person application or fingerprinting are associated with an estimated 56 percent fewer fatal mass shootings in states that have them, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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The public has long thought that handguns are more responsible for human deaths, including suicides, than long guns such as rifles and shotguns, which have been believed to be more commonly used for hunting or protection from wild animals. But now, in an analysis of data from 16 years of gun suicides in Maryland, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers found that long guns were used more often in suicides by kids and teens than by adults, and were more commonly used in suicide by people in rural counties.

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A new study by researchers at Case Western Reserve University examines how lawmakers could improve guidelines and policies to keep animal abusers from slipping through the cracks. Researchers also zeroed in on the well-established link between animal abuse and interpersonal violence.

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The number of political candidate television advertisements that refer to guns increased significantly across four election cycles in U.S. media markets, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study, to be published in the February issue of Health Affairs, analyzed more than 14 million televised campaign advertisements that aired for candidates running for president, U.S. Congress, governor, and state legislatures in 210 U.S. media markets over four election cycles in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. The researchers found that the number of political ads aired that referenced guns increased by 369,600, an eightfold increase from one percent of candidate-related television political ads aired in 2012 to 8 percent in 2018. Among the televised political ads aired that referenced guns, the share with gun regulation-oriented messages that were focused on reducing gun violence increased almost threefold over time–from 10 perce

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A mix of factors is involved in Chicago’s declining black population and others aren’t well defined, but inequality stands out as a leading element, according to a new report from the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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About 47,000 Americans die by suicide annually; more than half are by firearm. Now, researchers at Florida State University have found that certain clinical steps that encourage basic firearm safety could reduce that number.Their study, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, focused on young adults with a history of suicidal thoughts and who reported firearm familiarity, such as gun ownership, access or intention to obtain a firearm.

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Michael Anestis, a public health psychologist and expert on firearms and suicide risk, has been appointed as executive director of the New Jersey Center on Gun Violence Research led by Rutgers University.

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A new study finds that active shooter incidents off campus and politics are key factors that led state legislators to pass laws allowing concealed weapons on college and university campuses between 2004 and 2016.

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A study led by Jennifer Hoffmann, MD, from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, found that higher county-level poverty is associated with increased youth suicide rates among children 5-19 years old in the United States in 2007-2016. Children and adolescents from counties where 20 percent or more of the population lives below the federal poverty level were 37 percent more likely to die by suicide, compared to communities with the lowest poverty concentration. Youth suicide by firearms was 87 percent more likely in areas with the highest poverty levels. Findings were published in JAMA Pediatrics.

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Roughly one-third of young males and 1 in 10 females in rural communities have carried a handgun, reports a new University of Washington study. And, the study found, many of those rural kids started carrying as early as the sixth grade.

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The United States currently averages 20 mass shootings per year. Researchers from Michigan State University measured the extent to which mass shootings are committed by domestic violence perpetrators, suggesting how firearm restrictions may prevent these tragedies.

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A massive experiment that deployed regular police patrols on platforms in the London Underground has shown that four 15-minute patrols a day in some of the capital's most crime-ridden stations reduced reported crime and disorder by 21%.

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Coaching Boys Into Men, a program that seeks to prevent dating violence and sexual assault, reduces abusive behaviors among middle school male athletes toward their female peers, according to clinical trial results published today in JAMA Pediatrics.

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Teenage boys who witness their peers abusing women and girls are much more likely to bully and fight with others, as well as behave abusively toward their dates, compared to teenage boys who don’t witness such behaviors, according to a new study.

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The Danger Assessment, a popular and groundbreaking instrument that effectively assesses the risk of an abused woman to be seriously injured or killed by her intimate partner, is now being offered to all Veterans Administration (VA) clinical staff thanks to a licensing agreement between the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing (JHSON) and the VA.

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With violent crimes and gun violence rising annually and the number of gun deaths in the U.S. surpassing all other nations, researchers at the annual meeting of The Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) present a series of studies during its Study of Violent Crime and Gun Violence symposium which contributes several new frameworks that can be used toward improving laws, civilian strategies, legislation and police response, as well as the overall study of risk in society. The Symposium will occur on Monday, December 9 at 10:30 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia.

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Consistent with last year, Chicago parents again selected gun violence, bullying/cyberbullying and poverty as the top three social problems for children and adolescents in the city, according to the latest survey results released by Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH). Hunger was new to this year’s top 10 list of social issues facing youth, with 62 percent of parents across all community areas in Chicago considering it a big problem.

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The U.S. Department of Justice awarded a $1 million grant to launch a special court docket for cases involving high-risk domestic offenders. The Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court is partnering with social sciences researchers at Case Western Reserve University to develop, implement and evaluate the court docket.

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Paul Boxer is an expert on the development and management of aggressive behavior and director of the External Center on Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice at Rutgers University-Newark. Stephanie Bonne is assistant professor of surgery at New Jersey Medical School and director of the Hospital Violence Intervention Program at University Hospital in Newark, where she is a trauma surgeon and regularly treats gun-shot victims.

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A new training resource aimed at enhancing child-centred responses to violence against children, co-designed with children and young people, has been launched today (Monday 11 November) by academics from the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s University Belfast and Include Youth.

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After years of progress, the average life expectancy in the U.S. has been on the decline for three consecutive years. The second annual Bloomberg American Health Summit—taking place November 12 and 13, 2019, in Baltimore, Maryland—will bring together national leaders, policymakers, advocates, and innovators from across the country to share new knowledge and evidence-based practices around five focus areas implicated in reducing U.S. life expectancy: addiction and overdose, adolescent health, environmental challenges, obesity and the food system, and violence.

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Violence continues to rage in Mexico more than a decade after former President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown on drug cartels.

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Douglass Residential College at Rutgers University–New Brunswick will host a social justice teach-in by The Mothers of the Movement at 12:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 14. in Voorhees Chapel.

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A year before the 2020 presidential election, Americans report various issues in the news as significant sources of stress, including health care, mass shootings and the upcoming election, according to this year’s Stress in America™ survey by the American Psychological Association (APA). More than half of U.S. adults (56%) identify the 2020 presidential election as a significant stressor, an increase from the 52% of adults who reported the presidential election as a significant source of stress when asked in the months leading up to the 2016 contest.

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UAB’s Tara Warner explores why some individuals are more likely to own guns than others.

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The second annual Bloomberg American Health Summit—taking place November 12 and 13, 2019, in Baltimore, Maryland—will bring together national leaders, policymakers, advocates, and innovators from across the country to share new knowledge and evidence-based practices around five focus areas implicated in reducing U.S. life expectancy.

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Policy responses to school shootings have not prevented them from happening more frequently, but restorative justice has the potential to avert bad behavior and school shootings, finds a new study from Washington University in St. Louis.The study, “Disparate Impacts: Balancing the Need for Safe Schools With Racial Equity in Discipline,” published in the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, finds that crisis prevention policies enacted following school shootings tend to exacerbate racial and ethnic discipline disparities in several different ways.

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Psychology researchers at DePaul University have received a $6.6 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to reduce African American youth violence. The project will reach ninth graders in Chicago Public Schools and teach them coping skills to deal with stress, enhance resilience, and prevent interpersonal violence and suicide.

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While gun violence in America kills more than 35,000 people a year and as calls for policies to stem the crisis grow, University of Washington researchers point out in a new analysis that barriers to data stand in the way of advancing solutions.

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Over the last two decades, more Americans see people with mental health problems as dangerous and are willing to use legal means to force treatment, according to a new paper by IU Distinguished Professor of Sociology Bernice Pescosolido.

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Firearm injuries kill 2,500 American children each year. But the nation spends far less on studying what led to these injuries, and what might prevent and treat them, than it spends on other causes of death in children. In fact, on a per-death basis, funding for pediatric firearm research is 30 times lower than it would have to be to keep pace with research on other child health threats.

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Exposure to violence can negatively impact a person’s physical and psychosocial health, according to two new studies published in the policy journal Health Affairs.

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The rate at which Americans died from firearm injuries increased sharply starting in 2015, a new study shows. The change occurred to varying degrees across different states, types of firearm death such as homicide and suicide, and demographics. In all, the US saw a 14% rise in the rate of firearm deaths from 2015 through 2017, compared with the rate seen in the years 1999 through 2014.

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An increase in behavioral health providers is associated with a slight decrease in gun-related suicides, but the difference is small and points to a need to tackle gun violence in other ways, according to the authors of a new study.

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UNLV sociologist researches how interacting in online white supremacist networks can convert hateful words into real violence.

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Are gun owners more or less afraid than people who do not own guns? A new study from researchers at Florida State University and the University of Arizona hopes to add some empirical data to the conversation after finding that gun owners tend to report less fear than non-gun owners. The study, led by sociology doctoral student Benjamin Dowd-Arrow, used the Chapman University Survey of American Fears to examine both the types and the amount of fear that gun owners had in comparison to non-gun owners.

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Gun‐owning women exhibit levels of political participation about gun policy and a greater willingness to engage in political discussions about gun control than nonowning women, according to Alexandra Middlewood, assistant professor of political science at Wichita State University.

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People are more likely to blame violent video games as a cause of school shootings by white perpetrators than by African American perpetrators, possibly because of racial stereotypes that associate minorities with violent crime, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

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People living in marginalized communities in St. Louis, particularly African Americans, have been enduring, as one study participant said, “real problems” such as violence and racism that are perceived as more immediate than issues of climate change, finds a study from the Brown School at Washington University in St.

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Contrary to popular belief, war is not declining, according to a new analysis of the last 200 years of international conflict. In fact, the belief that war is disappearing has lulled us into a false sense of security,

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A new study from researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack led to a significant increase in social capital immediately following the incident. However, the boost in social capital reverts to pre-attack levels within 30 days.

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A new national public opinion survey conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds widespread agreement among gun owners, non-gun owners, and across political party affiliations for many U.S. gun violence prevention policies.

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