As I wrote earlier, the story of gun safety in US is about the spatial distribution of firearms and their patterns of ownership and use. Gun control concerns itself with purchasing and access rather than studying its spatial distribution.
Buying a gun is not the same as its ownership or operation, legal or otherwise. It’s more about who you know or don’t know and where you spend time with those persons, and it is about control in the sense of possession on one’s person, but rarely about confrontational display.
A recent analysis of gun violence (excluding accidental or self-inflicted discharges(sic)) demonstrates the irrelevance of pseudo-statistical arguments stating that more guns results in less crime as well as stochastic randomness or iteration of violence caused by media coverage effect or institutional rationalizations. For example, homicides by police are not measured nationally because… states versus federal data sovereignty or perhaps some other classification reasons unrelated to public health but with the nuances of litigation and prosecution.
America’s gun policy debate is usually driven by high-profile mass shootings that seem to strike at random, and it focuses on sweeping federal gun control or mental health policies.
But much of America’s gun homicide problem happens in a relatively small number of predictable places, often driven by predictable groups of high-risk people, and its burden is anything but random.
The concentration of gun homicides in certain census tracts mirrors what criminologists have discovered when they look at crime patterns within individual cities: roughly 1.5% of street segments in cities see about 25% of crime incidents, a trend dubbed “the law of crime concentration”.
The Guardian’s new geographic analysis is the first time that gun homicides nationwide have been mapped down to the census tract level, researchers said. This new approach was made possible with the geocoded data collected since 2014 by the not-for-profit Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings and gun deaths using media reports. The FBI’s national crime data only provides gun murder statistics down to the city level, which masks the clustering of violence within neighborhoods…
Gun violence is a regressive tax that falls heaviest on neighborhoods already struggling with poverty, unemployment, and failing schools. The unequal burden of violence is also marked by intense racial disparities…
the majority of residents have nothing to do with gun violence.
In New York, a city of eight million people, only 1.5% of census tracts saw two or more gun homicide incidents in 2015. That’s a much lower percentage than St Louis, where a shocking 44% of census tracts saw multiple gun homicides in 2015.
Compared with St Louis, New York also has much broader swathes of the city that saw no gun homicides at all.
New York City’s murder rate of about four murders per 100,000 people is neatly in line with the national average…
Even within high-poverty areas that struggle with many kinds of disadvantage, the majority of residents have nothing to do with gun violence.
Within neighborhood areas, the risk of violence is further clustered within specific social networks of high-risk people. Sometimes these are people whom police identify as gang members; sometimes they are not…
Both liberals and conservatives argue that the root causes of gun violence are extremely broad social trends.
- For conservatives, it’s “about things like cultures of violence, toxic family dynamics in minority communities, the failure of governmental approaches”, Kennedy said.
- For liberals, it’s historic oppression, racism, lack of opportunity, and the broad availability of guns.
As a result, both liberals and conservatives argue that fixing violence requires interventions that are “very enormous and very often essentially out of reach”, Kennedy said. “We’re talking about making changes that, as a practical matter, we’re not very good at: changing, in a broad way, gender in society, changing, in a broad way, social patterns or racism or bias. Fixing the schools. That’s very difficult stuff.”
But neither partisan analysis really lined up with the data on America’s murder concentration, Kennedy said. If single parent families, or poverty, or easy gun availability were the main drivers of gun violence, “that should result in vastly more violence that there is”.
Instead, some researchers argue, the concentration of gun violence in America more closely resembles the spread of a contagious disease. Inequity and poverty are risk factors.
But violence itself may spread from person to person like a virus, meaning that particular networks of people, not whole neighborhoods or demographic groups, are most at risk.
Shootings could and do happen anywhere, still, but as a matter of likelihood, it depends on the spatial and possession factors indicated above. But even being in one of the 127 urban areas where most gun homicides occur doesn’t even appreciably increase one’s odds of being involved in a gun homicide. OTOH, the odds change with race, gender, age, and Constitutional authority among other variables and in degrees of influence less than the spatial and custodial ones, but no less than the expectations of public safety constrained by neighborhoods and measured by Census data.
Geographic particularities like the location of personally owned firearms mapped above for one New York county lives in contradiction often to the actual location of their uses or their exchanges. The concentration of firearms does not match the dispersion of ownership if 20% of the national population owns 65% of all guns. Similarly the location of production of firearms or the MIC might have regulatory policies much different than the locations of distribution and consumption. www.dailykos.com/...