Panel:
Gun Violence, Solutions, and Unintended Consequences
(Crime, Justice, and Drugs)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
This session will investigate broadly investigate both the causes and consequences of gun violence.
The first two papers will investigate the role of police effort in reducing gun violence. In one paper the question concerns whether police effort can explain the difference in clearance rates between fatal and non-fatal gun assaults. The second paper will investigate a monitoring program which required intensive effort from police. Their efforts resulted in the removal of tens of thousands of firearms and hundreds of thousands of contacts of individuals on the monitoring list. The authors investigate if this resulted in lower homicide rates.
The third paper investigate the demand for firearms. Recently many communities and states have passed gun restrictions following the Parkland mass shooting. While this may reduce violence in the long run, in the short run it could have the unintended effect of increasing gun ownership which may dampen the benefits of the gun control measures.
The final paper studies whether recent mass shooting reduce birthweight.
Given the breadth of topics and the inclusion of students, faculty, public policy researchers, economists, and criminologists, our session will be of interest to the rich set of researchers attending APPAM.
