Gun control, or firearms regulation, is the set of laws or policies that regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, modification, or use of firearms by civilians.
More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John R. Lott Jr. that says violent crime rates go down when states pass "shall issue" concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. Each edition of the book was refereed by the University of Chicago Press. As of 2019, the book is no longer published by the University of Chicago Press. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 13 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies and by Lott and his co-author John Whitley in The Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
Arthur L. Kellermann is an American physician and epidemiologist. Until his resignation in November 2022, he served as a professor of emergency medicine at the VCU School of Medicine, senior vice president of health sciences for Virginia Commonwealth University, and CEO of the VCU Health System. He was formerly professor and dean of the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Kellerman served as director of the RAND Institute of Health and founded the department of emergency medicine at Emory University and the Center for Injury Control at Rollins School of Public Health. His writings include 200 publications on various aspects of emergency cardiac care, health services research, injury prevention and the role of emergency departments in providing health care to the poor. Kellermann is known for his research on the epidemiology of firearm-related injuries and deaths, which he interpreted not as random, unavoidable acts but as preventable public-health priorities. Kellermann and his research have been strongly disputed by gun rights organizations, in particular by the National Rifle Association of America, although Kellermann's findings have been supported by a large body of peer-reviewed research finding that increasing gun ownership is associated with increased rates of homicide and violence.
Gary Kleck is a criminologist and the David J. Bordua Professor Emeritus of Criminology at Florida State University.
The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong is a book by John Lott, following up on his controversial More Guns, Less Crime. It is intended to reach a broader audience than its highly technical predecessor. Lott explores what he sees as misconceptions about gun ownership, including the practice of carrying concealed weapons.
A suicide method is any means by which a person may choose to end their life. Suicide attempts do not always result in death, and a non-fatal suicide attempt can leave the person with serious physical injuries, long-term health problems, or brain damage.
Jay Woodson Dickey Jr., was a Republican U.S. Representative for Arkansas's 4th congressional district from 1993 to 2001. The amendment known as the Dickey Amendment (1996) blocks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding injury prevention research that might promote gun control, and the Dickey–Wicker Amendment (1995) prohibits federal funds to be spent on research that involves the destruction of a human embryo.
Gun violence is a term of political, economic and sociological interest referring to the tens of thousands of annual firearms-related deaths and injuries occurring in the United States.
Gun-related violence is violence against a person committed with the use of a firearm to inflict a gunshot wound. Gun violence may or may not be considered criminal. Criminal violence includes homicide and assault with a deadly weapon. Depending on the jurisdiction, suicide or attempted suicide may also be considered a crime. Non-criminal violence includes accidental or unintentional injury and death. Also generally included in gun violence statistics are military or para-military activities.
In 2018, the Small Arms Survey reported that there are over one billion small arms distributed globally, of which 857 million are in civilian hands. The survey stated that American civilians account for an estimated 393 million of the worldwide total of civilian held firearms, or about 120.5 firearms for every 100 American residents.
Private Guns, Public Health is a 2004 policy opinion book by David Hemenway, an economist who has served as Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health as well as the Director of Harvard's Injury Control Research Center. He argues that the widespread ownership of firearms in private hands in the U.S. promotes the spread of the "disease" of gun violence, and he takes a collective interpretation of the Second Amendment while stating that increased regulations are absolutely necessary in the purposes of public safety. Hemenway makes the central case that "more guns in a community lead to more homicide". He published the book through the University of Michigan Press in 2004. A new edition was released, also by the University of Michigan Press, in 2017.
Defensive gun use (DGU) is the use or presentation of a firearm for self-defense, defense of others or, in some cases, protecting property. The frequency of incidents involving DGU and their effectiveness in providing safety and reducing crime are controversial issues in gun politics and criminology, chiefly in the United States. Different authors and studies employ different criteria for what constitutes a defensive gun use which leads to controversy in comparing statistical results. Perceptions of defensive gun use are recurring themes in discussions over gun rights, gun control, armed police, open and concealed carry of firearms.
A universal background check for guns is a policy that requires a background check for all gun sales or transfers, regardless of where they occur or who is involved. This includes sales at gun shows, private sales between individuals, and sales made online. The idea is to close loopholes in existing laws that currently allow some gun purchases to occur without background checks.
Fred Rivara is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Washington at Seattle Children's Hospital known for his research into the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence in the 1990s. Rivara has also researched bicycle helmets, intimate partner violence, and alcohol abuse, among other topics.
The National Firearms Agreement (NFA), also sometimes called the National Agreement on Firearms, the National Firearms Agreement and Buyback Program, or the Nationwide Agreement on Firearms, was an agreement concerning firearm control made by Australasian Police Ministers' Council (APMC) in 1996, in response to the Port Arthur massacre that killed 35 people. Four days after the killings, Australian Prime Minister John Howard told Parliament “We need to achieve a total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic weapons. That will be the essence of the proposal that will be put by the Commonwealth government at the meeting on Friday...". The APMC would agree to and form the NFA 12 days after the massacre on the 10th of May 1996.
Daniel W. Webster is an American health policy researcher and the distinguished research scholar of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also the deputy director for research at the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, and the first Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2016, he became the director of the Johns Hopkins-Baltimore Collaborative for Violence Reduction, a joint crime-fighting effort between Johns Hopkins and the Baltimore Police Department.
The Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1997 omnibus spending bill of the United States federal government that mandated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control." In the same spending bill, Congress earmarked $2.6 million from the CDC's budget, the exact amount that had previously been allocated to the agency for firearms research the previous year, for traumatic brain injury-related research.
Deborah Azrael is an American public health researcher. She is a research associate in the Harvard School of Public Health's Department of Health Policy and Management, and the associate director of the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. She is also the research director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and a major figure involved in the firearm-related research conducted there.
Matthew Jason Miller is an American physician and epidemiologist. He is an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, where is also the co-director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He is also a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Northeastern University. He is board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. He is known for his research into injury and violence prevention.
The Harvard Injury Control Research Center is a research center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health dedicated to studying injury prevention. In November 2016, the Center received a grant of over $650,000 from the National Institute of Justice to study police shootings. This was one of the few grants that the federal government has given to study gun violence in the last two decades.
