Firearms and Violence A Critical Review (2005) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 11-18
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From page 11... ...
Young people are especially affected by this, so much so that firearm fatalities consistently rank among the leading causes of death per capita for youth. In 2000, people ages 20 to 24 accounted for almost one-fourth of all victims of homicides with a firearm (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2001)
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From page 12... ...
Even if firearms are shown to be a cause of lethal violence, the development of successful prevention programs remains a complex undertaking, as such interventions would undoubtedly have to address the many factors other than the firearm that are involved in any violent situation. Many people derive benefits from firearm ownership.
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From page 13... ...
The Committee to Improve Research and Data on Firearms was charged with providing an assessment of the strengths and limitations of the existing research and data on gun violence and identifying important gaps in knowledge; describing new methods to put research findings and data together to support the design and implementation of improved prevention, intervention, and control strategies for reducing gun-related crime, suicide, and accidental fatalities; and utilizing existing data and research on firearms and firearm violence to develop models of illegal firearms markets. The charge also called for examining the complex ways in which firearm violence may become embedded in community life and whether firearmrelated homicide and suicide become accepted as ways of resolving problems, especially among youth; however, there is a lack of empirical research to address these two issues.
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From page 14... ...
It is justified if it involves the reasonable use of force by law enforcement personnel or by people defending themselves against crimes. It is difficult, of course, to count justified and unjustified harms accurately and even harder to discover whether a program intended to reduce unjustified harm has actually done so and, if it has, whether it did so in ways that have not inappropriately reduced justified harms.
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From page 15... ...
Our report is not for or against "gun control." (We put gun control in quotation marks because it is so vague: "gun control" can range from preventing four-year-old children from owning guns to banning their ownership by competent adults.) Knowing how strongly so many Americans feel about firearms and various proposals to control or prevent controls on their ownership, we here state emphatically that our task is to determine what can be learned from existing data and studies that rely on them and to make recommendations about how the knowledge base could be effectively improved.
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From page 16... ...
As we discuss in this report, this has not happened in the firearms area, in part, because of the substantial opposition to data collection by interest groups resulting in legal restrictions on collecting information about firearms ownership.2 STANDARDS AND METHODS FOR FIREARMS RESEARCH All research must follow some basic standards to be accepted by the community of scholars in a field -- firearms research is no different. These standards are well known to scientists, although all of them are not achieved in every research effort and meeting these minimal standards does not guarantee that the completed research will be judged to be a contribution to knowledge.
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From page 17... ...
For advances to be made in firearm violence research, researchers must be careful to use these techniques and approaches with due recognition of their limitations and carefully consider the effect of research design on findings. In our analysis of the use of these methods in firearms research, we found too often that the conclusions reached require the acceptance of assumptions that are at best implausible.
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From page 18... ...
Chapter 3 is a summary of the data describing the extent of firearm violence, firearm ownership, the perpetrators and victims of firearm violence, and the context in which firearm violence occurs. Descriptive in form, it also identifies gaps in understanding of some of the basic facts about the role firearms play in intentional violence.
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