Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

The Armed Citizen Project Hopes to Fight Crime by Giving Out Free Guns

June 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Handing out guns to make everyone safer? Nope, we’re not talking about Syria. This is Texas, folks. From the Associated Press last week, a story that somehow escaped our sights: the Armed Citizen Project, a non-profit project founded by 29-year-old Kyle Coplen, is giving free shotguns to people, especially single women, living in high-crime neighborhoods. Along with the guns come free gun-safety training classes. The organization says it costs them about $300 per person, for the gun and the training, and all of that money comes from private donations. As of last week’s report, the ... Read More

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Violent Crime Is Dropping: Why Are We So Scared?

June 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
the-wire

Blame it on the media? A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that most Americans think that gun crime has increased in the past two decades—but they’re dead wrong. In the survey of 900 adults, 56 percent thought gun crime had increased, 26 percent thought it had stayed about the same, and only 12 percent thought it had gone down. Those 12 percent were right. A separate report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that the number of gun homicides decreased by 39 percent from 1993 to 2011, and that non-fatal shootings fell by 69 percent. According to the FBI’s ... Read More

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You Can’t Ban Guns at the Public Pool

June 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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If you feel unsafe at a public pool in Charleston, West Virginia, you may soon have the right to lie there on a towel with a handgun at your side. For 20 years, Charleston has been an island of modest gun restrictions in a very pro-gun rights state. But its gun laws—including a ban on guns in city parks, pools, and recreation centers—are now likely to be rolled back, the latest victory in a long-standing push to deny cities the power to regulate guns. Since the 1980s, the National Rifle Association and other groups have led a successful campaign to get state legislatures to limit ... Read More

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Don’t Bring a Gun to a Bear Fight, and Other Bits of Unconventional Firearm Wisdom

April 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Yesterday, Tom Hartsfield and Alex Berezow mined data in an attempt to decipher what meaningful correlations exist between guns and violence, if indeed any do at all. Their analyses have been instructive and controversial, to say the least. Though there's a paucity of research on gun violence in the United States on a large scale (a dearth that should be remedied), many smaller studies have examined other peculiar aspects of firearms, producing some quite unconventional wisdom: Those with the opportunity to use a gun may be more likely to engage in threat-induced behavior. DON'T BRING A ... Read More

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Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate

April 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: This post is a follow-up to Alex Berezow's "The Correlation Between Gun Ownership and Homicide Rate." Controlling and regulating gun ownership is for the purpose of making society safer by reducing the rates of murder and violent crime. Does this premise hold true? That is, do fewer guns per capita correlate with a safer country? Recently, Alex Berezow analyzed the correlation between the number of privately-owned guns per capita in a country and the rate of homicide by firearms. This is a sensible first step to answer the question of whether reducing the number of guns in ... Read More

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The Correlation Between Gun Ownership and Homicide Rate

April 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: Tom Hartsfield has written a follow-up to this post, "Gun Ownership Neither Increases Nor Decreases the Crime Rate." Since the tragedy at Newtown, citizens and lawmakers have been pushing for tighter gun control. Their argument seems rather intuitive: The fewer guns, the safer we are. Popular Science hammered the point home in an article titled "Science Confirms the Obvious: Gun Laws Are Associated With Fewer Gun Deaths." But is it really that simple? According to the article, the authors "created 'legislative strength scores' on a scale of 0 to 28 for each state's ... Read More

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The Truth About Violence and Gun Policy in the United States

April 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: This post was originally published on December 21, 2012. I’ve been reluctant to write about the terrible events at Sandy Hook Elementary school because the wounds are still too fresh for any kind of dispassionate analysis. As a social scientist, however, I’m disappointed by the fear-mongering and selective presentations of the research evidence I’ve read in reports and op-eds about Friday’s awful killing. Such events could help move us toward constructive actions that will result in a safer and more just world—or they could push us toward counter-productive and ... Read More

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Guns, Game, and Control: Who Are America’s Hunters?

December 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Since the Newtown massacre I have heard repeatedly that one necessary act for advancing gun control is to get “hunters” (or at least rural types) on board. That line of thought has been boosted by “pro-gun” Sen. Joe Manchin, a reliable NRA lieutenant who’s now uttering heresies like: "I don't know anyone in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anyone that needs 30 rounds in a clip to go hunting. I mean, these are things that need to be talked about." (Need and want are different animals, of course. Fast-firing rifles with big ... Read More

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Political Stereotyping (cont.): The Case of The Gun Shop That Stopped Selling Machine Guns

December 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLXkQb9B8s More than 150,000 have viewed the above video since 2010. Had you? Our own Tom Jacobs recently reported compelling findings that liberals are more likely to stereotype conservatives, than the reverse. This week we're seeing anecdotal evidence for why that might be so. Below, some selected results from a Twitter search for "Cheaper Than Dirt." If those words don't ring a bell for you, you're probably not a gun owner. CTD, as enthusiasts call the shop, is one of the largest and most successful online gun dealers in the country—the Amazon.com ... Read More

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School Shootings and Gun Control

December 14, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
(ILLUSTRATION: DENMARINO/SHUTTERSTOCK)

The tragic mass killings at that Connecticut school will undoubtedly spur renewed calls for gun control. According to one criminologist, that would be a welcome but somewhat ironic development, since mass school shootings seldom provide compelling evidence in favor of more restrictions on weapons. The scholarly journal American Behavioral Scientist devoted two issues in 2009 to the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School mass killings and what, if anything, we have learned from them. Gary Kleck, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University, contributed an ... Read More

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