R e s e a r c h i n P r o g r e s s S e m i n a r S e r i e s

❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚ ❚

Jeremy Travis, Director June 1996

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

OFF ICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS

BJA NI J OJJDP BJS OVC

R e s e a r c h P r e v i e w

National Institute of Justice

Misuse of firearms and its related violence have been the

source of new challenges to the criminal justice and

medical professions. Criminal justice responses to gunrelated violence involve deterrence, incapacitation, and

rehabilitation of perpetrators, while medicine focuses on

providing emergency and trauma care as well as physical

rehabilitation to injured victims. A third approach—the

public health model—stresses prevention and addresses

both potential victims and offenders. The three perspectives have obvious overlapping interests and expertise to

share.

As part of the effort to reduce firearm violence, research

projects at Emory University’s Center for Injury Control

feature an explicit partnership between public health and

local law enforcement. Some key findings of this effort

indicate:

■ Firearms in the home are associated with an increased

risk of suicide or homicide among family members

residing there.

■ Guns kept in the home do not offer substantial protection against homicide at the hands of an intruder.

■ The number of individuals who are injured and require

medical treatment for gunshot wounds is three to eight

times the number who are killed by guns.

■ Existing gunshot injury reporting systems do not link

emergency department records with police reports to

support criminal investigations.

■ Health care providers often fail to report patients with

gunshot wounds to the authorities, even in jurisdictions

with mandatory reporting.

■ Policy relevant research on gun-violence reduction

efforts, especially in terms of youth violence, is vital to

finding which aspects of such comprehensive programs as Atlanta’s Project PACT* are effective.

Guns in the home: protection or peril?

Approximately half of all homes in America contain one or

more firearms. Although many gun owners keep a gun in

their home at least in part for self-protection, studies

conducted over the past decade suggest that the risks of

keeping a gun in the home outweigh the potential benefits. For example, two large population-based case

control studies have found that keeping a gun is associated with an increased risk of violent death in the home.

The studies identified suicides and homicides that

occurred in the home of the victim, regardless of the

instrument of death. By interviewing surviving next-of-kin

and identifying behavioral characteristics of the family

and environmental characteristics of the household,

researchers were able to develop profiles of those homes

that were the scene of a violent death. Through a process

of random selection, investigators then identified a

neighboring household that contained an individual of the

same age range, gender, and race as the case household. In each of these “control” households, an adult

family member was interviewed, and a similar profile of

behavioral, personal, and environmental characteristics

was compiled.

By comparing the characteristics of households where a

violent death occurred to those of neighboring households where a violent death did not occur, risk factors for

violent death could be identified. Several behavioral

factors (e.g., living alone, depression, alcoholism, illicit

drug use, previous arrest history, previous family violence

history) were strongly and independently linked to an

increased risk of suicide or homicide in the home. However, even after these characteristics were taken into

account, and case and control households were matched

for age, sex, race, and neighborhood, researchers found

Understanding and Preventing Violence:

A Public Health Perspective

Summary of a Presentation by Arthur L. Kellermann, M.D., M.P.H., Emory University
As part of NIJ’s Research in Progress Seminar Series,

Arthur L. Kellermann, M.D., M.P.H., discussed the

work summarized in this document with an audience

of researchers and criminal justice professionals and

practitioners. Dr. Kellermann is director of the Center

for Injury Control, School of Public Health, and associate professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine,

School of Medicine, Emory University.

A 60-minute VHS videotape, Understanding and

Preventing Violence: A Public Health Perspective, is

available for $19 ($24 in Canada and other foreign

countries). Please ask for NCJ 152238. Use the order

form on the next page to obtain this videotape and

any of the other tapes now available in the series.

Points of view in this document do not necessarily reflect the

official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Whereas a law enforcement officer would view such

claims with skepticism, physicians almost always take the

patient at his word.

In an effort to create a fail-safe process for notifying

authorities, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has been

asked to provide a single, regional, round-the-clock

telephone contact number so emergency room personnel

can report gun-related injuries and provide physical

profiles to appropriate law enforcement officials. Emory

University researchers hope to link these reports to police

records to build a real-time electronic data base that will

allow police and public health officials to quickly discern

patterns, “hot spots,” and trends as well as identify

wounded fugitives when they contact the health care

system.

Educating communities about juvenile

gun violence

Local government officials in the five-county greater

Atlanta area have recently joined with city and community

leaders under Project PACT* to forge a comprehensive

community-based approach to gun violence. Designed to

break the link between youths and guns, the program will

involve young people as well as culturally sensitive and

appropriate media messages, school-based education,

neighborhood groups, and support from grassroots

organizations.

In addition, under a new Georgia State law, juvenile

offenders using guns will be referred to and handled by

the adult court. The Emory University team is evaluating

this effort with support from a consortium of Federal

agencies.

*Pulling America’s Communities Together

that homes with guns were almost five times more likely

to be the scene of a suicide and almost three times more

likely to be the scene of a homicide than comparable

homes without firearms.

No evidence was found to indicate that keeping a gun in

the home offered substantial protection from homicide,

even in the subset of cases where someone forcibly

entered the home. In those cases, the presence of a gun

neither increased nor decreased the risk of violent death.

Instead, researchers found that homes with guns were

much more likely to be the scene of a homicide involving

a spouse, a family member, or an intimate acquaintance.

Survey data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics

between 1987 and 1992 estimated that guns are used in

self-defense each year approximately 82,000 times. But

this figure compares to the annual toll of more than 1.5

million instances of criminal violence involving firearms.

Guns probably are used infrequently in self-defense

because the criminals often rely on stealth, surprise, or

sudden force to achieve their goal. Few victims have

sufficient time to secure a weapon.

Tracking nonfatal gun injuries

The computer systems of many medical care facilities and

law enforcement agencies do not lend themselves to

tracking nonfatal data. Hospital admission data bases do

not include information about individuals treated and

released, and law enforcement data bases—usually

indexed by the type of offense—do not readily indicate

whether a weapon was involved.

To fill this gap, researchers at Emory University and other

institutions are studying the incidence and impact of gunrelated violence in three cities: Memphis, Tennessee;

Seattle, Washington; and Galveston, Texas. According to

preliminary data, for every firearm homicide in Memphis,

another seven patients required medical care; in

Galveston, the ratio of nonfatal to fatal cases was nearly

8 to 1, while in Seattle, the ratio was close to 3 to 1. The

weapon used in most cases was a handgun. In Memphis,

handguns were used in 87 percent of gun-related assaults where the type of weapon was recorded. Handguns account for about one-third of all privately owned

firearms in the United States.

Researchers have found they needed both hospital

emergency reports and police offense reports, but

gathering this information is cumbersome and slow. The

Emory University team was surprised to learn that even

in States where reporting is legally mandated, health care

providers do not always notify police of a gunshot wound,

often because they are told by the person seeking

medical assistance that the police were already notified.
The Latest Criminal Justice

Videotape Series from NIJ:

Research in Progress Seminars

Learn about the latest developments in criminal justice

research from prominent criminal justice experts.

Each 60-minute tape presents a well-known scholar discussing his current studies and how they relate to existing criminal

justice research and includes the lecturer’s responses to audience questions. In addition to Understanding and Preventing Violence: A Public Health Perspective, reported on in this Research Preview, the other tapes available in VHS format are:

NCJ 152235—Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D.,

Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research, Carnegie Mellon

University: Youth Violence, Guns, and Illicit

Drug Markets.

NCJ 152236—Peter W. Greenwood,

Ph.D., Director, Criminal Justice

Research Program, The RAND Corporation: Three Strikes, You’re Out: Benefits and

Costs of California’s New Mandatory

Sentencing Law.

NCJ 152237—Christian Pfeiffer, Ph.D.,

Director of the Krimino-logisches

Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen:

Sentencing Policy and Crime Rates in Reunified

Germany.

NCJ 152692—James Inciardi, Ph.D.,

Director, Drug and Alcohol Center,

University of Delaware: A CorrectionsBased Continuum of Effective Drug Abuse

Treatment.

NCJ 153270—Adele Harrell, Ph.D.,

Director, Program on Law and Behavior,

The Urban Institute: Intervening with HighRisk Youth: Preliminary Findings from the

Children-at-Risk Program.

NCJ 153271—Marvin Wolfgang, Ph.D.,

Director, Legal Studies and Criminology,

University of Pennsylvania: Crime in a

Birth Cohort: A Replication in the People’s

Republic of China.

NCJ 153730—Lawrence W. Sherman,

Ph.D., Chief Criminologist, Indianapolis

Police Department, Professor of Criminology, University of Maryland: Reducing

Gun Violence: Community Policing Against

Gun Crime.

NCJ 153272—Cathy Spatz Widom,

Ph.D., Professor, School of Criminal

Justice, State University of New York—

Albany: The Cycle of Violence Revisited Six

Years Later.

NCJ 153273—Wesley Skogan, Ph.D.,

Professor, Political Science and Urban

Affairs, Northwestern University:

Community Policing in Chicago: Fact or

Fiction?

NCJ 153850—Scott H. Decker, Ph.D.,

Professor and Chair, Department of

Criminal Justice and Criminology,

University of Missouri–St. Louis, and

Susan Pennell, Director, Criminal Justice

Research Unit, San Diego Association of

Governments: Monitoring the Illegal

Firearms Market.

Qty. Presenter Name and NCJ Number Subtotal

 

 

 

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NCJ 154277—Terrie Moffitt, Ph.D.,

Professor, Department of Psychology,

University of Wisconsin: Partner Violence

Among Young Adults.

NCJ 156923—Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D.,

Director, Hispanic Research Center,

Fordham University: The New Immigrant

Hispanic Populations: Implications for Crime and

Delinquency in the Next Decade.

NCJ 156924—Robert Sampson, Ph.D.,

Professor, Department of Sociology,

University of Chicago: Communities and

Crime: A Study in Chicago.

NCJ 156925—John Monahan, Ph.D.,

Professor of Psychology and Legal

Medicine, University of Virginia School of

Law: Mental Illness and Violent Crime.

NCJ 157643—Benjamin E. Saunders,

Ph.D., and Dean G. Kilpatrick, Ph.D.,

Medical University of South Carolina:

Prevalence and Consequences of Child Victimization: Preliminary Results from the National

Survey of Adolescents.

NCJ 159739—Joel H. Garner, Ph.D.,

Research Director, Joint Centers for

Justice Studies: Use of Force By and Against

the Police. ✂

To order any of these tapes, please complete and return this form with your payment ($19, U.S.; $24, Canada

and other countries) to National Criminal Justice Reference Service, P.O. Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849–6000.

Call 800–851–3420, or e-mail askncjrs@ncjrs.aspensys.com if you have any questions.

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