“Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has people around the world feeling vulnerable and scared. In America, individualism and firearm culture have generated a unique response to this threat: stockpiling firearms and ammunition.1
Historically, it is unlikely that these firearms will be used defensively.2 In fact, there is strong evidence that, on balance, firearms in the home don’t protect people from harm, but instead put everyone in the household at increased risk of injury.3
In this issue: Welcome to the inaugural newsletter of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP), California Firearm Violence Research Center (CA FVRC), and BulletPoints Project.
Gun-violence research experts at UC Davis Health say that despite a significant drop in firearm injuries in recent years in California, there has been a substantial increase in the state’s overall death rate among those wounded by firearms.
The U.S. prohibits firearm purchase among individuals with specific risk factors. These prohibitions are operationalized using background checks for firearm purchase. Despite these restrictions, prohibited persons have obtained firearms after passing background checks, sometimes with devastating effects.
The California Firearm Violence Research Center has awarded nearly $225,000 in grants to investigators studying gun violence exposure among adolescents, intimate partner violence and sex trafficking.
In the first four years since California established extreme risk protection order (ERPO) policies, use of the relatively new violence prevention tool has increased substantially.
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social and economic disruptions may be associated with increased risk for reported domestic violence (DV) and firearm-involved DV (FDV). This study examines trends in DV, FDV, and the proportion of DV incidents that involved firearms (FDV/DV) in five large US cities before and during the coronavirus pandemic.
AbstractObjectiveThis study investigates the association between replacement thinking, status threat perceptions, and the endorsement of political violence among non-Hispanic white adults in the United States.
“J.P. had begun to believe that the mafia was monitoring him and that they had deployed operatives to follow him to Oregon when he moved from California. He thought a tracking chip had been implanted in his neck, that robotic birds were conducting surveillance on him, and that he was being watched through his cell phone, which he destroyed in a fit of rage. At one point, he was sleeping with a shotgun under his bed to defend himself, despite a prior arrest for carrying a handgun illegally.
