MENU TITLE: Firearms and Violence
Series: NIJ Research in Brief
Published: February 1994
17 pages
36,550 bytes

Firearms and Violence
by Jeffrey A. Roth

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Issues and Findings

Discussed in the Brief: The current status of
research and evaluations concerning firearms and
violent crime, as reviewed by the National Academy
of Sciences Panel on the Understanding and Control
of Violent Behavior.

Key issues:  Most murders involve firearms, and
young minority men are at especially high risk of
being murdered with a gun.  Innovations in laws,
law enforcement, public education, and technology
all show promise of reducing gun murders by
selectively making firearms less available to
persons likely to use them in violence, less
accessible in situations where violence is likely
to occur, or less lethal.  Evaluations are needed
to test the effectiveness of these innovations.

Key findings:

o Firearms are used in about 60 percent of the
murders committed in this country, and attacks by
firearms injure thousands of others.  The risk of
being murdered with a firearm falls
disproportionately on young people, particularly
young black men.

o Greater gun availability increases the rates of
murder and felony gun use, but does not appear to
affect general violence levels.

o Self-defense is the most commonly cited reason
for acquiring a gun, but it is unclear how often
these guns are used for self-protection against
unprovoked attacks.

o According to the latest available data, those
who use guns in violent crimes rarely purchase
them directly from licensed dealers; most guns
used in crime have been stolen or transferred
between individuals after the original purchase.

o In robberies and assaults, victims are far more
likely to die when the perpetrator is armed with a
gun than when he or she has another weapon or is
unarmed.

o Several strategies may succeed in reducing gun
murders, but rigorous evaluations are needed to
ascertain their effectiveness.  Among these are
reducing firearm lethality (e.g., by banning
certain types of ammunition), reducing
unauthorized use (e.g., through combination locks
on triggers, or sentence enhancements for burglary
and fencing violations that involve guns), and
educating the public about safe use and storage.

o Evaluation findings indicate that the following
kinds of laws can reduce gun murder rates when
they are enforced:  prohibitions on carrying
concealed weapons, extending sentences for robbery
and assault when a gun is used, and restrictive
licensing requirements for handgun ownership.

o Where there is local support, priority should be
given to three enforcement objectives:  disrupting
illegal gun markets; reducing juveniles' access to
guns; and close cooperation between the police and
the community to set priorities and enforce laws,
in order to reduce the fears that lead to gun
ownership for self- defense.

Target audience:  Federal, State, and local
government policymakers, law enforcement
practitioners, and community organizations.
-------------------------------------------------

Approximately 60 percent of all murder victims in
the United States in 1989 (about 12,000 people)
were killed with firearms. According to estimates,
firearm attacks injured another 70,000 victims,
some of whom were left permanently disabled. In
1985 (the latest year for which data are
available), the cost of shootings--either by
others, through self-inflicted wounds, or in
accidents--was estimated to be more than $14
billion nationwide for medical care, long-term
disability, and premature death. Among firearms,
handguns are the murder weapon of choice. While
handguns make up only about one-third of all
firearms owned in the United States, they account
for 80 percent of all murders committed with
firearms.1

Teenagers and young adults face especially high
risks of being murdered with a firearm. Figures
for 1990 from the National Center for Health
Statistics indicated that 82 percent of all murder
victims aged 15 to 19 and 76 percent of victims
aged 20 to 24 were killed with guns. The risk was
particularly high for black males in those age
ranges. The firearm murder rate was 105.3 per
100,000 black males aged 15 to 19, compared to 9.7
for white males in the same age group. This 11:1
ratio of black to white rates reflects a
perplexing increase since 1985, when the firearm
murder rate for black males aged 15 to 19 was 37.4
per 100,000. Among 20- to 24-year-old black males,
the rate increased from 63.1 to 140.7. For several
years before 1985, the rates for black males in
these age groups had been decreasing. The recent
increases have not been paralleled for females,
whites, or older black males, nor have they been
matched in non-gun murder rates or even firearm
suicide rates for young black males. (The latter
are higher among whites than among blacks but have
risen recently for both races.)2

For these reasons, the Panel on the Understanding
and Control of Violent Behavior devoted
substantial attention to issues surrounding
firearms and violence, relying on a commissioned
background paper,3  critical commentary on a draft
of that paper, and its own review of published
research literature. This report summarizes the
panel's conclusions.

Research findings

Any firearm murder follows a particular chain of
events: One person acquires a firearm; two or more
people come within reach of the firearm; a dispute
escalates into an attack, the weapon is fired; it
causes an injury; and the injury is serious enough
to cause death. While that sequence probably seems
obvious, thinking about gun murders as a chain of
events draws attention to a series of risks that
should be measured and questions that should be
considered in designing strategies to reduce
murders or other violent events that involve guns.

Some potentially useful distinctions should be
made at the outset:

1. Availability of guns refers to the overall
number of guns in society and the ease of
obtaining them.

2. Possession of a gun simply means ownership,
regardless of how the weapon is stored, carried,
or used.

3. Access to a gun as a weapon of violence means
its immediate availability at the site of a
violent event and depends on how the gun is stored
or carried.

4. Allocation of guns refers to the distribution
of gun possession among people who have and people
who have not demonstrated high potentials for
violent behavior.

5. Lethality of guns or other weapons means the
likelihood that a person injured by the weapon
will die as a result.

Each of these distinctions raises specific issues
about the relationship of guns to violence.


How is gun availability related to violence
levels?

Speculation about the relationship between gun
availability and violence levels takes two
directions. On one hand, greater availability of
guns may deter some potential perpetrators of
violent crimes out of fear that the intended
victim may be armed. On the other hand, greater
availability of guns may encourage people who are
contemplating committing a violent crime to carry
it out but first to arm themselves to overcome
their fear of retaliation. Greater gun
availability may also increase violence levels if
guns kept at home or in cars are stolen during
burglaries, enter illegal markets, and encourage
criminals to attack victims they would pass up
without being armed. Guns kept in homes may also
be used in family arguments that might have ended
nonviolently if guns were not available.

How are these conflicting speculations resolved in
actual practice?  The best way to answer this
question would be to measure violent crime levels
before and after an intervention that
substantially reduced gun availability. However,
opportunities to evaluate the effects of such
interventions have arisen in only a few
jurisdictions.


Because evaluation opportunities have been rare,
researchers have used four less powerful
approaches to study how gun availability affects
violence and its consequences.  The findings,
while somewhat tentative and not entirely
consistent, suggest that greater gun availability
increases murder rates and influences the choice
of weapon in violent crimes, but does not affect
overall levels of nonfatal violence.

The first research approach asks how differences
in violence across American cities are related to
variations in gun availability, controlling for
other relevant factors.  These studies generally
find small positive correlations between measures
of gun availability and both felony gun use and
felony murder.  However, they find no consistent
relationship between gun availability and overall
rates of violent crime.

The second approach used was a comparison of two
jurisdictions. The neighboring cities of Seattle
and Vancouver have similar economic profiles and
were found to have similar rates of burglary and
assault. However, Seattle, with its less
restrictive gun possession laws, had a 60 percent
higher homicide rate and a 400 percent higher
firearm homicide rate than Vancouver. It is not
clear whether the differences in gun laws
accounted for all the variation between the two
cities in homicide rates, or whether differences
in culture were also contributing factors.

The third approach relies on cross-national
statistical comparisons.  These studies have
generally reached one of the conclusions found in
studies of American cities:  a small positive
correlation between gun availability and homicide
rates.  The finding is difficult to interpret,
however, in view of differences by country in
culture and in gun regulations.  For example,
murder rates are low in Switzerland, where militia
requirements make possession of long guns by males
nearly universal.  This seems to suggest there is
no positive correlation between gun availability
and murder rates.  But this interpretation is
clouded because in Switzerland access to guns is
limited:  militia members are required to keep
their guns locked up and to account for every
bullet.

The fourth approach relies on analyses of trends
over time. Studies using this method have found no
correlations between gun availability and rates of
violent crime. But trends are subject to a variety
of influences, which may mask a relationship that
would emerge in the aftermath of some new law or
other intervention that substantially reduced gun
availability. Evaluation findings about such
interventions are discussed later in this report,
but more such evaluations are needed to obtain
better answers to this question.

How do people obtain possession of guns they use
in violent crime?

Although available data on how guns are obtained
are fragmented, outdated, and subject to sampling
bias, they suggest that illegal or unregulated
transactions are the primary sources of guns used
in violence. For example, only 29 percent of 113
guns used in felonies committed in Boston during
1975 and 1976 were bought directly from federally
licensed dealers (27 of the 29 percent were
obtained by legally eligible purchasers). Between
the manufacturer and the criminal user, 20 percent
of the guns passed through a chain of unregulated
private transfers, while 40 percent were stolen.
Most of the illegal suppliers found in this sample
were small-scale independent operators who sold
only a few guns per month, rather than large
organizations or licensed dealers working largely
off the books.4

More recent data were available on how
incarcerated felons in 10 States obtained the guns
they used in committing crime. The figures
revealed that in 1982 only 16 percent of those who
used guns in criminal activities reported buying
them from licensed dealers. Twice as many (32
percent) reported stealing the gun, and the rest
borrowed or bought it from friends or
acquaintances. Thefts and illegal purchases were
not surprisingly most common among the
incarcerated felons who said they acquired their
guns primarily to commit crimes.5

More up-to-date information on how juveniles
obtain guns will be available in the forthcoming
report of a study sponsored by NIJ.6 The
researchers studied samples of juveniles who were
imprisoned for serious violent crime and students
who attended inner-city high schools.

How does gun access affect the consequences of
violent events?

Researchers have studied how the presence of a gun
affects the consequences of two types of violent
crime--personal robbery and assault. Both types of
crime may begin with a threat to use violence.
Studies have examined how the likelihood of three
outcomes of the threat--escalation to an actual
attack, to injury, and to death--changes if the
robber or assaulter posing the threat is armed
with a gun.

A study of personal robberies revealed that
escalation from threat to attack is less likely if
the robber is armed with a gun than if he or she
is unarmed.7  A similar pattern was found in
assaults.8 Perhaps the reason is that robbers
armed with guns are less nervous, or victims
confronted with guns are too frightened to resist,
or both. Either effect could reduce the risk of
escalation from threat to attack.

One implication of the lower escalation rate when
guns are used is that robbery and assault victims
are less likely to be injured when the perpetrator
has a gun. When data reported through the National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) between 1973 and
1982 are combined, they reveal that among victims
who survive attacks, the chance of injury was 14
percent when the offender was armed with a gun. It
was higher when a gun was not used--25 percent when
the offender was armed with a knife, 30 percent
when unarmed, and 45 percent when armed with
another weapon.9

How does gun use affect the chance that a violent
crime will end in the victim's death?

The overall fatality rate in gun robberies is an
estimated 4 per 1,000--about 3 times the rate for
knife robberies, 10 times the rate for robberies
with other weapons, and 20 times the rate for
robberies by unarmed offenders.10 For assaults, a
crime which includes threats, the most widely
cited estimate of the fatality rate is derived
from a 1968 analysis of assaults and homicides
committed in Chicago. The study, prepared for the
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention
of Violence, reported that gun attacks kill 12.2
percent of their intended victims. This is about 5
times as often as in attacks with knives, the
second most deadly weapon used in violent crimes.11
With one exception, more recent studies have
generally concluded that death was at least twice
as likely in gun assaults as in knife assaults.12

While researchers who have looked at the question
generally concur that victims injured by guns are
more likely to die than victims injured by other
weapons, an important question remains: how much
of this greater lethality reflects properties of
the gun, and how much reflects greater
determination to kill by those who choose guns
over other weapons for their violent acts? The
question is significant for public policy because
even the removal of all guns from society would
not prevent hom-icides if the greater lethality of
gun injuries were due entirely to violent gun
users' greater determination. They would simply
achieve their goal using other weapons.

The relative importance of weapon type and user
determination in affecting the deadliness of gun
attacks has not been definitively established
because researchers cannot directly measure user
determination. Indirect measures indicate that
firearms are sometimes fired at people without a
premeditated intent to kill. The question is how
often? If the motivations of gun murderers and
knife murderers systematically differed, then
systematic differences in the surrounding
circumstances would be expected. In fact, however,
the gun and knife murders in the 1968 Chicago
sample occurred under similar circumstances
--largely arguments in which alcohol and
temporary rage, not single--minded intent, were
most likely to have influenced the killer's
behavior. More than 80 percent of gun victims in
the sample received only a single wound, a finding
which suggests that killers and assaulters who
used guns failed to use the full capabilities of
their guns to achieve the goal of killing.13  The
interpretation of these statistics has been
questioned on methodological grounds, however;
and, in any event, the interactions among
circumstances, motivation, and weapon choice in
murder may well have changed since 1968.

The study of personal robberies, discussed above,
suggests at least one reason other than lethal
intentions why some robbers use guns: to enable
them to attack certain types of victims, such as
businesses and groups of teenage males, who would
otherwise be relatively invulnerable. Guns are
used more often to rob these types of victims than
to rob women and the elderly, who are considered
more vulnerable. Serial killers are considered the
most intent of all killers, but they have rarely
used guns. People who killed in violent family
fights seem unlikely to have carefully considered
their weapon choices; more likely, they resorted
to the nearest available weapon, including hands
or feet. Even among incarcerated felons, those
interviewed in the 10-State survey cited above, 76
percent of those who fired guns in criminal
situations claimed to have had no prior intention
of doing so.14

These observations and findings strongly suggest
that properties of weapons, rather than intentions
of attackers, account for at least some of the
difference in lethality between guns and other
weapons. However, the apportionment is not
precise, and questions have been raised about the
methodologies used in the studies.15 Measuring more
precisely how much of the lethality difference
arises from different intentions rather than from
the choice of a gun remains a problem for future
research.


Does use of a gun in self-defense reduce the
injury risk of violent events?

Self-defense is commonly cited as a reason to own
a gun. This is the explanation given by 20 percent
of all gun owners and 40 percent of all handgun
owners contacted for a household survey conducted
in 1979.16 Just how often potential victims of
violence defend themselves with guns is unclear,
in part because "self-defense" is a vague term.
Among a sample of prisoners, 48 percent of those
who fired their guns while committing crimes
claimed they did so in self-defense. At a minimum,
victims use guns to attack or threaten the
perpetrators in about 1 percent of robberies and
assaults--about 70,000 times per year--according to
NCVS data for recent years. These victims were
less likely to report being injured than those who
either defended themselves by other means or took
no self-protective measures at all.  Thus, while
33 percent of all surviving robbery victims were
injured, only 25 percent of those who offered no
resistance and 17 percent of those who defended
themselves with guns were injured.  For surviving
assault victims, the corresponding injury rates
were, respectively, 30 percent, 27 percent, and 12
percent.17

For two reasons, these statistics are an
insufficient basis for the personal decision
whether or not to obtain a gun for
self-protection.  First, the decision involves a
trade-off between the risks of gun accidents and
violent victimization.  Second, it is not entirely
clear that the relatively few robberies and
assaults in which victims defended themselves with
guns are typical of these types of crimes and that
the lower injury rates resulted from the
self-defense action rather than some other factor.
Perhaps offenders lost the advantage of surprise,
which allowed victims not only to deploy their
guns but also to take other evasive action. More
detailed analysis of gun self-defense cases is
needed to measure both the frequency and
consequences of different self-defense actions
using guns.


Policy implications

Currently, firearm sales and uses are subject to
Federal, State, and local regulations that are
intended to reduce gun-related criminal activity.
The Federal Gun Control Act of 1968 is intended to
control the allocation of guns by requiring that
dealers obtain Federal licenses; by prohibiting
them from selling guns through the mail or across
State lines to anyone except other licensed
dealers; and by barring sales to
high-risk-category individuals such as minors,
felons, and drug users. According to the U.S.
General Accounting Office, resources available to
enforce the Act declined during the 1980's, and
the news media have reported instances of
convicted felons and active drug dealers obtaining
Federal dealers' licenses that have permitted them
to purchase guns in large quantities.

Changing the allocation of guns from high-risk to
low-risk individuals is one of four strategies
that have been attempted to reduce gun-related
violent crimes. To reduce high-risk uses of guns,
some States have enacted "place and manner" laws
to prevent carrying or concealing guns in public,
or to enhance sentences for felonies in which guns
are used. Other legal strategies are intended to
reduce the availability of guns through
restrictive licensing that permits only selected
categories of people (such as police and private
security offi-cers) to possess guns. Legally
required waiting periods for gun purchases are
intended both to facilitate verification that
purchasers belong to the permitted categories and
to reduce "impulse buying" by people who may have
temporary violent intentions.

Some States have attempted to reduce the lethality
of available weapons by banning sales of certain
categories of weapons used in violent crimes.
These categories include concealable "Saturday
night specials" or high-capacity "assault
weapons," both of which have proven difficult to
define in practice.

The high lethality of gun injuries and the heavy
involvement of guns in murder have prompted an
intense public debate and a search for strategies
to reduce gun homicides. Legal, technological, and
public education approaches may all have roles to
play. However, the effectiveness of any of these
strategies in reducing gun murders depends on the
strength of two influences that counteract each
other:

o The behavioral response--the extent to which
people behave in ways that reduce the level or
severity of gun violence because of newly
available protective technology, public education
campaigns, or the threat of legal punishment.

o Substitution effects--the extent to which the
desired behavioral responses are offset by
high-risk behaviors such as use of more lethal
guns, disarming of gun combination locks by gun
thieves, or the assign-ment by drug organizations
of juveniles to gun-using roles because they are
subject to lighter penalties than adults.

Because the strength of these two effects cannot
be predicted in advance, evaluation is needed to
identify the effects of any of the four types of
strategies/interventions. Most of them have not
been evaluated, and some of the evaluations have
produced unclear results. However, studies of the
four strategies have yielded some valuable
information:

o Strategy 1: Alter gun uses. Both "place and
manner" laws and sentence enhancements for felony
gun use have been shown to be effective in States
(Michigan and Pennsylvania) where they have been
evaluated. But neither legal approaches (such as
making owners or manufacturers liable for damages
caused by the gun) nor technological approaches
that make guns and their illegal uses more visible
have been evaluated. Some public education
initiatives have been evaluated, but the findings
have been called into question because of
measurement problems.

o Strategy 2: Change gun allocation. An evaluation
of the effect of the Federal Gun Control Act of
1968 was conducted in two States where
restrictions against instate purchases should make
interstate trafficking the major source of guns
used in crime. The evaluation did not find that
the Act reduced gun use in assaults or homicides.
However, a later evaluation of a crackdown to
enforce the Federal law in the District of
Columbia did show a 6-month reduction in gun
homicides. Neither technological innovations, such
as built-in combination locks that permit only the
legal owner to fire the gun, nor law enforcement
approaches, such as disruption of illegal gun
markets or mandatory minimum sentences for gun
theft, have been evaluated.

o Strategy 3: Reduce gun lethality. Neither legal
nor technical restrictions that would reduce gun
lethality have been evaluated.

o Strategy 4: Reduce gun availability. The results
of several evaluations indicated that the 1977
District of Columbia Firearms Control Act, which
prohibited handgun ownership by virtually all
private citizens, reduced gun robberies, assaults,
and homicides for several years. More intrusive
legal restrictions on imports, manufacture, or
ownership have not been evaluated.

The following evaluation findings are especially
significant:

o The Massachusetts 1974 Bartley-Fox Amendment,
which prescribed a 1-year sentence for unlicensed
public carrying of firearms, decreased gun
assaults, gun robberies, and gun homicides during
the 2-year period in which it was evaluated.

o Several State mandatory add-ons to felony
sentences for use of a gun have reduced gun
homicides, but whether they have discouraged gun
use in robberies and assaults is not clear.

o The decrease in Washington, D.C., gun homicides
following passage of the 1977 D.C. Firearms
Control Act appears to have been maintained until
the mid-1980's when, according to a recent study,
the rise of crack markets was accompanied by a
substantial increase in gun homicides.18

o The 1968 Federal Gun Control Act, which
prohibited Federally licensed gun dealers from
selling guns to certain designated "dangerous"
categories of people, failed to reduce firearm
injuries or deaths, apparently because of lax
enforcement.

Evaluations of firearm laws suggest that
enforcement is critical to their effectiveness.
Therefore, while public debate continues over the
wisdom of enacting new gun laws, the Panel
concluded that priority should be given to three
aspects of enforcing existing laws:

o Disrupting illegal gun markets by means of
undercover buys, sting operations, and other
tactics at the wholesale and retail levels.

o Reducing juveniles' access to guns through
better enforcement of the Federal ban on gun
dealers' sales to minors and through disruption of
the illegal or unregulated channels through which
juveniles obtain guns.

o Close police-community cooperation in setting
priorities and enforcing gun laws, as a means of
reducing the fears that lead to gun ownership for
self-defense.

Long-term efforts are needed to design and
implement these and other enforcement tactics so
they are both effective and acceptable to the
local community; to test them in carefully
controlled evaluations; to refine them as
indicated by the evaluation findings; and to
replicate the evaluations in different community
settings.


Notes

1. Confusion frequently arises in discussions of
firearms (a generic term equivalent to "guns")
used in violence because of inconsistencies
between legal and popular classifications of
firearms. The Code of Federal Regulations
governing firearms distinguishes between rifles,
shotguns, and handguns. Rifles are designed to
fire solid bullets, and shotguns are commonly used
to fire shells that contain small pellets, called
"shot." Rifles and shotguns are frequently grouped
together as "long guns," a term referring to their
design, which generally requires that the user
fire from the shoulder. Long guns may be shortened
by sawing off the barrel, which makes them easier
to conceal for use in crime. Handguns include
pistols and revolvers designed to be fired with
one hand. No Federal regulations require
registration of handguns or long guns that shoot
only one bullet or shell with each squeeze of the
trigger; most such guns require reloading after
six shots at most. Federal registration and taxes
are required to own a machinegun, a weapon that
can be made to shoot "automatically" (more than
once) by holding the trigger in a squeezed
position. Ammunition clips holding many bullets
can be attached to machineguns or "semi-automatic"
pistols and rifles (that is, weapons designed to
accept ammunition clips, many of which can be
converted to fire automatically), allowing them to
fire 15 or 32 shots without reloading. Such
weapons are sometimes popularly called "assault
weapons," a term that has no precise definition.

2. Fingerhut, Lois A., "Firearm Mortality Among
Children, Youth, and Young Adults 1-34 Years of
Age, Trends and Current Status: United States,
1985-1990," National Center for Health Statistics,
Advance Data, 231, March 23, 1993. The article
contains additional details of firearms mortality.
Unpublished data from the National Center for
Health Statistics indicate that in 1991 the
firearm homicide rate increased still further, to
123.6 per 100,000 black males aged 15 to 19 and to
164.4 per 100,000 for those aged 20 to 24.  These
data were not available when the panel study was
conducted.

3. Cook, Philip J., "The Technology of Personal
Violence." In M. Tonry, ed., Crime and Justice,
Volume 14. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.

4. Moore, Mark H., "Keeping Handguns From Criminal
Offenders," The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 455 (1981):92-109.

5. Wright, James D., P.H. Rossi, and K. Daly, The
Armed Criminal in America: A Survey of
Incarcerated Felons, National Institute of Justice
Research Report, Washington, D.C.: National
Institute of Justice, 1983.

6. Sheley, Joseph F., and James D. Wright, Gun
Acquisition and Possession in Selected Juvenile
Samples, Research in Brief, Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Department of Justice, National Institute of
Justice, forthcoming.

7. Cook, Philip J., "Reducing Injury and Death
Rates in Robbery," Policy Analysis 6(1)
(1980):21-45. The study focus was personal
robberies reported in the National Crime
Victimization Survey.

8. Kleck, Gary, and Karen McElrath, "The Effects
of Weaponry on Human Violence," Social Forces,
69(3) (1991):1-21. This study also used data from
the National Crime Victimization Survey.

9. Bureau of Justice Statistics, The Use of
Weapons in Committing Crimes, Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 1986.

10. Cook, Philip J., "Robbery Violence," Journal
of Criminal Law and Criminology, 78(2)
(1987):357-376.

11. Newton, G.D., and F.E. Zimring, Firearms and
Violence in American Life: A Staff Report
Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes
and Prevention of Violence, Washington, D.C.:
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention
of Violence, 1969.

12. The exception is Kleck and McElrath, "The
Effects of Weaponry on Human Violence."

13. Zimring, Frank E., "Is Gun Control Likely to
Reduce Violent Killings?" The University of
Chicago Law Review, 35 (1968):721-737.

14. Wright, J.D., P.H. Rossi, and K. Daly, Under
the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America,
Hawthorne, New York: Aldine Publishing Company,
1983:15.

15. See, for example, Wright, Rossi, and Daly,
Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in
America.

16. Decision-Making Information, Inc., Attitudes
of the American Electorate Toward Gun Control,
Santa Ana, California: Decision-Making
Information, Inc., 1979.

17. Kleck, Gary, "Crime Control through the
Private Use of Armed Force," Social Forces, 35
(1988):1-22. See Table 4, p. 8.

18. Loftin, C., D. McDowall, B. Wiersema, and T.
J. Cottey, "Effects of Restrictive Licensing of
Handguns on Homicide and Suicide in the District
of Columbia," New England Journal of Medicine, 325
(December 1991):1615-1620.

Author's Biography

Dr. Jeffrey A. Roth served as study director for
the Panel on the Understanding and Control of
Violent Behavior. Currently he is research
director in the Bethesda, Maryland, office of the
Law and Public Policy area of Abt Associates, Inc.

Sidebar 1

Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent
Behavior

Violence is universally recognized as a pervasive
part of contemporary American society and of our
Nation's past as well. Many of the attempts to
understand the phenomenon have been made in
response to specific situations, such as the
lawlessness of the Prohibition era, the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and
the urban riots of the mid-1960's. Other attempts
at understanding violence singled out particular
causes for analysis. In none of these studies,
however, was the full body of research on violence
reviewed comprehensively, and none of them took an
interdisciplinary approach.

The Panel on the Understanding and Control of
Violent Behavior was set up to meet the need for a
more comprehensive assessment of what is known
about violent behavior. It was established in
response to a request made by three Federal
agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF),
the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
NSF asked for a review of current knowledge about
the causes of violent behavior and recommendations
for future research. The other two agencies shared
these goals, but their areas of interest reflected
their particular missions. As the research arm of
the U.S. Department of Justice, NIJ wanted to find
out about means to prevent and control violent
crime. The CDC wanted assistance in setting
priorities for preventing injuries and deaths
caused by violence.

Created in 1989, the panel reviewed research on
"interpersonal violence"--events involving at most
a few perpetrators and victims. This limitation
excluded suicide and self-mutilation as well as
large-scale collective and State violence. The
focus was on describing, understanding, and
controlling violence in the United States.
Research in biomedical, psychological, and other
social sciences was reviewed. The work of the
panel was intended both to help guide future
research and evaluation projects aimed at
prevention and control and to suggest strategic
directions for violence control policy.

The findings, conclusions, and recommendations of
the panel were published in Volume 1 of
Understanding and Preventing Violence, published
by the National Academy Press. Three volumes of
background papers commissioned by the panel are
forthcoming. The panel concluded that numerous,
often interacting factors give rise to violent
events. Although the underlying interactions are
not well understood, attention to the factors
suggests many promising preventive interventions.
Testing and evaluating these interventions creates
opportunities to prevent particular types of
violence while gaining better understanding of
them. The panel made recommendations in a number
of areas, among them development of
problem-solving initiatives to control and
understand violence; better statistical systems
for measuring violence; and a program of research
to identify underlying causes. This Research in
Brief is one of a series that summarizes the
panel's findings.

NIJ is committed to implementing the
recommendations of the panel. Its commitment has
begun through support for the Program on Human
Development and Criminal Behavior, a longitudinal,
multi-community research project that is exploring
the factors associated with violence. In addition,
the panel's recommendations have helped shape the
goals of NIJ research and evaluation activities
and its long-range plans for research.

Copies of Understanding and Preventing Violence
are available from the National Academy Press,
2101 Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington, DC
20418 (800-624-6242).