Dr. Garen Wintemute, the director of the UC Davis Centers for Violence Prevention, and Julia Schleimer, Research Data Analyst with the UC Davis Centers for Violence Prevention, discussed gun violence and firearm purchasing trends during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in a Lunch & Learn webinar hosted by the Joyce Foundation.
The slideshow presented by Julia Schleimer can be found here.
Gun-related crime continues to be an urgent public health and safety problem in cities across the US. A key question is: how are firearms diverted from the legal retail market into the hands of gun offenders? With close to 8 million legal firearm transaction records in California (2010–2020) linked to over 380,000 records of recovered crime guns (2010–2021), we employ supervised machine learning to predict which firearms are used in crimes shortly after purchase.
Firearm purchasing records offer a potentially important administrative data source to identify individuals at elevated risk of perpetrating firearm violence. In this study, we describe individual, firearm, and transaction characteristics of purchasers in California who were arrested for a firearm-related violent crime (FRV) as compared to the general population of registered purchasers in the state.
Little is known about support for and willingness to engage in political violence in the United States. Such violence would likely involve firearms.
Objective
To evaluate whether firearm owners’ and nonowners’ support for political violence differs and whether support among owners varies by type of firearms owned, recency of purchase, and frequency of carrying a loaded firearm in public.
“Tracking the movement of firearms from legal purchase to use in crimes can help inform prevention of firearm injuries and deaths,” explained Hannah S. Laqueur, senior author of the study. Laqueur is an associate professor in the UC Davis Health Department of Emergency Medicine.
Gun characteristics associated with weapons being recovered at a crime include:
Firearm violence is a major cause of death and injury in the United States. Tracking the movement of firearms from legal purchase to use in crimes can help inform prevention of firearm injuries and deaths. The last state-wide studies analyzing crime gun recoveries used data from over 20 years ago; thus, an update is needed.
Prohibiting the purchase and possession of firearms by those at risk of violence is an established approach to preventing firearm violence. Prior studies of legal purchasers have focused on convictions for specific crimes, such as violent misdemeanors and driving under the influence (DUI). We broaden that line of inquiry by investigating and comparing the associations between prior arrests for most categories of crime and subsequent arrest for violent offenses among legal handgun purchasers in California.
Firearm-related interpersonal violence is a leading cause of death and injury in cities across the United States, and understanding the movement of firearms from on-the-books sales to criminal end-user is critical to the formulation of gun violence prevention policy.
A first-of-its-kind study examining records of gun purchases in California found that mass and active shooters have distinct patterns of buying guns compared to other legal purchasers. The UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) research was published in the Journal of Criminal Justice.
AbstractPurposeTo examine the firearm acquisition histories of mass and active shooters from California. MethodsFirst, we identified 22 individuals with a record of authorized handgun purchase in California who perpetrated an attack between 1996 and 2018. Using incidence density sampling, mass and active shooters were matched to purchasers and compared using conditional logistic regressions.
