This panel focuses on victimization from several angles. The moderator, Emmy Betz, is an emergency physician who regularly treats victims of gun use in addition to being a prominent researcher. The other panelists–Jackie Schildkraut, Jennifer Paruk, and Niskanen senior fellow Kerri Raissian– have expertise in mass shootings, child gun injury, gun use in incidents of domestic violence, and regulatory approaches to limited gun injury. They discuss the diversity of gun injuries in the U.S. and policy approaches that have been shown to reduce those injuries.
Transcript
Kerri Raissian: Hello and welcome to today’s webinar, the Many Faces of Gun Victimization in America. My name is Kerri Raissian and it’s a pleasure to be here with you today. I want to start by thanking the American Academy of Political and Social Science and then Niskanen Center for hosting today’s webinar. My colleagues, Jennifer Dineen, Cass Crifasi and I were recently special editors of a volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The volume is entitled Preventing Gun Violence in America, What Works and What’s Possible, and this special issue serves as the catalyst for today’s conversation. The issue brings together scholars from a wide variety of fields including public policy, public health, criminology, sociology, and law, to name but a few. This diversity was important to the editors because we believe that gun violence is a complex problem that requires an all hands, all scholarship on deck kind of approach.
Today, we will share with you some of what we wrote about in the journal, and I’m delighted to be joined by Doctors Emmy Betz, Jaclyn Schildkraut and Jennifer Paruk, all of whom were contributors to the Journal. I also want to mention that Sage and through the generosity of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, have made this journal permanent free to view access, which means it’s open access forever. So anyone can access this journal at any time without experiencing a paywall. We are thrilled that our partners at Niskanen worked with each author and author team to create a short and accessible brief for each of the journal’s articles, and those briefs provide a great summary and overview of each article. Finally, we will host another panel on Thursday, July 20th at 2:00 PM to discuss gun rights and responsibility in America.
Richard is going to put the links for all of that into the chat, the journal, the briefs and registration for our next webinar. So today’s panel, getting to why you’re here today, it’s my pleasure to introduce our panelists to you. We have Dr. Jacky Schildkraut. She is the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, and she’s also a national expert on mass shootings. Jennifer Paruk is a PhD candidate at Michigan State University in the School of Criminal Justice, and her research expertise is in public health and criminal justice policies related to violence prevention including extreme risk protection orders. My name is Kerri Raissian and I’m an associate professor of public policy at Yukon as well as the director of Yukon’s Arm Center.
And we are so lucky to have Dr. Emmy Betz join us as today’s moderator. Dr. Betz is an emergency physician and researcher who is nationally recognized for her collaborative approach and scientific contributions to firearm injury prevention. In addition to managing her own research portfolio, she’s the director of CU’s Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative. Having gotten to know Emmy a little better over the last few years, I think one of the things that stands out the most about her is her commitment to understanding the needs of both gun owners and non-gun owners to make interventions and policies both sustainable and practical. So it’s my pleasure to turn this panel over to Emmy. Emmy.
Emmy Betz: Great. Well thank you for that kind introduction. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I am going to have, I think, a pretty easy job because this is really a phenomenal panel and I’m excited to learn from you all. In discussing ahead of time, we decided we’re going to go by first names now even though we’re all doctors, so that’ll make it a little bit easier too. When Kerri and I were talking about this webinar and the goals, we did want to express a couple of things at the beginning. So the first is that any topic within gun violence, you could spend hours talking on. To do a deep dive into any topic. So in one hour we’re not going to be able to cover everything, and I think we want to acknowledge that right upfront. So specifically today, we’re not going to be talking as much about suicide, but we want to acknowledge that suicide is the leading cause of firearm related death in this country, an incredibly important problem.
It’s where most of my own research has been, and it will require different educational solutions, policy solutions and so forth. So it’s the fact that we’re not focusing as much on that today does not mean that it is not important. I also want to acknowledge that we recognize there are differential rates of different types of firearm violence in different communities as defined by race, ethnicity, geography, gender and so forth. And we’re not going to be able to fully dig in to the nuances there that are incredibly important, but just want to call that out as well, that recognizing when we think about designing and implementing both research and preventive solutions for communities, it’s really important that we be engaging with the affected communities. In my own line of work, that often means working with firearm owners around firearm suicide prevention. For other types of firearm violence, that can mean working with the communities that are experiencing high rates of violence.
So with that as background, I think I just want to jump in to hear what you all have to say today. I think Jackie is going to go first as a overview for the panel today each presenter is going to have some slides and a presentation on their area, and then I’ll ask a question or two after that. And then we are hoping to have some Q and A time at the end. So audience, please put any questions you might have into the Q and A box and we’ll also be putting some links in the chat box. As Kerri mentioned, the links are for the journal articles are already there. So I’m now thrilled to turn it over to Jackie. I think the rest of us are going to take a back seat for a little bit and then I’ll come back. Jackie, over to you.
Jaclyn Schildkraut: Thank you, Emmy. Bear with me just one second. Share my screen here. So first of all, thank you to both Kerri and then the center for setting this up today and inviting me to be a part of it. My paper in the Annals issue was co-authored by Lisa B. Geller of the Johns Hopkins Center, and we specifically looked at how you can prevent and respond to mass shootings in America. And before we begin, I just want to give a little bit of a disclaimer because one of the challenges to researching in this space or even having a conversation in this space is the lack of a definition of mass shootings. We don’t have one from the federal government. We don’t have one within the research space. And so that lack of parameters, if you will, really leads to different statistics all across the board. My work specifically focuses on mass public shootings, which is going to be what my presentation is on, but as Emmy said, it really bears noting that mass shootings are not something that are solely in these public spaces.
We know that they happen in residential locations and they also happen in impoverished and communities of color. So very important that we’re recognizing that this is also a problem that touches many across this nation. So in terms of where they occur, even when looking at a more constrained or narrow definition of mass public shootings, these are still happening all across the nation. There’s very few states, I think at last check it was four to five, that have never experienced a mass public shooting, and they happen at all different types of locations. The most common places that we’re seeing these types of incidents happen are at schools and also at workplaces. And the reason why that is, is most perpetrators of these events are current or former students or current or former employees. So a lot of it has to do with ease of access to location, familiarity, particularly a level of comfort as to why they’re choosing these spaces.
They’re familiar with their surroundings, they know how to access, they know what security breaches they might need to engage in to bypass safety or other types of parameters. And so those are the two that we see the most commonly. But we also know from previous events that they happened elsewhere, they’ve happened at places of worship, like in Pittsburgh, they’ve happened at supermarkets like Buffalo, which sits about two hours from where I am right now. They’ve happened at malls across the country, movie theaters, concerts, and the reality is that these can happen anywhere. And I say that to you not only as a presenter or as Kerri so nicely pointed out I’m a national expert of mass shootings, but I’m also somebody that comes from two of the communities that have had very high profile and highly lethal mass shootings. I actually grew up in the community where the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was in 2018 and went to college in Orlando where the Pulse shooting was in 2016.
And when we think about the impact of these events, we tend to focus very narrowly on who we are talking about. And so I want to give a diagram of what this looks like. At the epicenter of this, we can think of it using the metaphor of an earthquake at the epicenter is going to be the families of the deceased and then those who are physically injured in the attacks and families of deceased obviously can be their immediate family, parents, spouses or partners, children, other immediate family. But there’s also extended family that are impacted that we often don’t think about. And then of course, you have the physically injured survivors as well as their families. And as we ripple outwards, that footprint’s going to get larger. So we also have, and this is more prevalent in terms of number, the people who are present but not physically injured.
And that’s really important to think about because even though they might not bear physical scars of what happened that day, we know from the research that they experience other types of scars or the injuries that we can’t see. This ring on or wave of the earthquake also includes our first responders. People like medical examiners and others who have to make death notifications. Even the media are sometimes enveloped in this because there’s so much exposure to what’s going on that people become all consumed with it and it ends up impacting them as well. As you radiate outwards again from there, then you have people within the community who may not be directly impacted, but know somebody who was. And so through sharing of stories, through media accounts, through just the presence of having access to all of the media being present in the community, the lights, the sirens, everything else, that can also be very triggering and cause PTSD and then just members of the impacted community as a whole.
This is a very widespread event. It’s not something that we think about in a very tiny little compartmentalized package. These are events that encompass the entire community in which they occur. And there’s also everybody else. One of the things that we know from all of the shootings that have happened is every time that there’s another one, it brings up all of the issues and memories and experiences for everyone else that experienced one prior. So it has that rippling effect where it reopens those old traumatic injuries.
So realistically, even though we think about this having a very small footprint, it actually has a very large footprint. And why that’s important is because at least at the federal level, we’re not equipped to service communities in that large footprint. So for instance, there’s funding that’s available for communities through the anti-terrorism and emergency assistance program that uses a very, very narrow definition of what a crime victim is, and it usually doesn’t involve most of the people who are in that earthquake rippling out from the epicenter, excuse me. And so because of that, that puts the onus on the community to then have to find the resources to be able to help individuals or for individuals to have their own resources like private insurance, which not everybody has.
Now, one thing that we have to think about in this space is the reality is that we always want to try and prevent these things from happening. Of course, we know that they happen and they make the news, but we want to think about how we can prevent them from occurring in the first place. And one of the challenges is that people tend to focus really heavily on what these individuals look like, but the reality is that even though they’re very different in what they look like and where they come from and where it’s happening, they all share a lot of common behaviors and those behaviors escalate over time, which subsequently creates opportunities for deescalation if those threats are brought to the attention of individuals like law enforcement who can do something about getting the necessary help in place.
For instance, we know from research done by the National Threat Assessment Center that 100% of attackers in their study exhibited concerning behaviors prior to their attack. 83% of those made specific threats of their intentions known to others through a process called leakage, excuse me. And at least one person in two thirds of those cases knew and didn’t come forward. We also know from the shootings that don’t happen what we call averted shootings, that this is still a problem that 94% of attackers share their intentions in advance and even still, at least one person knew and didn’t come forward in at least half the cases. So regular civilians really are the first line of defense when it comes to mass public shootings. This is why it’s so important to encourage reporting not only in schools, but also at a community level. To provide reporting outlets, again, we know that a lot of schools have tip lines, but there also are opportunities and communities around the nation that have community-based tip lines that can be used to submit information.
And then it’s also critical that people are following up on those tips as well. We know that unfortunately, in some cases there have been tips that have made it all the way through and not followed up on and events we’re able to come to fruition. This leads to the applicability of threat assessment, that once that individual is known or on somebody’s radar that the potential or propensity for them to commit the act itself can be assessed. And if they are determined to be a actual credible threat to not only others but also to themselves, then you can put a management plan into place in order to again, deescalate it and remove the opportunity for that shooting to occur. One way that we can achieve that is risk protection orders, which I know one of my colleagues is going to talk about a little bit later, so I’m going to just skip on over that.
But I want to just reinforce the idea that prevention is possible. The challenges that we don’t often hear about the shootings that don’t happen, which means that we’re only hearing about the ones that do, and that colors the perception that these are unpreventable. Unfortunately, no matter how much we try to prevent them, we also have to be mindful that response may in fact just be our reality. And this is where we look at practices like lockdown drills. And this is something I’ve been working on for the last five years. I’ve conducted the largest study to date, in the nation, about the effects of lockdown drills, and we have to think about why these are so important. Number one, like any school safety drill, whether it’s a fire drill or a tornado drill, lockdown drills allow us to practice our plans so that way we know what we’re doing.
We’re able to build muscle memory so that if we find ourselves in those very stressful situations, where thinking is compromised, that our bodies will go onto autopilot and do what we’ve trained them to do. We know that it improves people’s perceptions of preparedness. We also know it can have positive effects like reducing people’s anxiety. We know that it can make them feel more prepared to respond to emergencies. They might have lower fear of harm and actually decreased anxiety when drills are conducted in accordance with trauma-informed practices for harm mitigation. And most importantly, we know that lockdowns save lives. Earlier this year, some colleagues and I published a paper where we found that both in schools and out of schools, lockdowns had a protective effect that reduced not only overall casualties but on-scene fatalities when lockdowns were executed during a shooting.
One thing I want to just touch upon before I wrap up my time is it’s so important that we look at it from nose to tail, from start to finish, and that also requires us to think about recovery and resiliency. And unfortunately, as you might imagine, mass shootings, even though we’ve had a fair number in this country, just simply don’t come with a playbook. And so there’s a lot of lessons that we can learn from previous shootings about how best to support individuals when that crisis begins, because that’s also when that same recovery starts.
And one thing I would really encourage people to think about is the idea of normal. The minute that that first gunshot goes off really in any community, but especially in a mass casualty incident, the definition of normal changes. And so now you’re learning to function in this new normal, which is something that survivors often talk about. It’s almost like a parallel reality to ours where they can’t get back and they’re having to function in this new space. There’s a lot of different stages that an individual will go through, and when communities are planning or thinking about how they might respond to one of these events, it’s very important not only to think about that immediate aftermath, but also the long-term.
Because one thing that survivors indicate is that oftentimes, they don’t even come to terms with the fact that they need help or resources until after those resources have run out. So it’s really important to recognize that recovery is going to be a long-standing, long-term, probably rest of your life situation, and communities have to be prepared to support for that long term.
One of the things that is so important in the recovery of mass shooting survivors is other mass shooting survivors. I’ve conducted research and I’m currently conducting research with survivors and time after time, they constantly talk about of all of the resources that they really go to for help, it’s each other. And so I think it’s so important that our policymakers are thinking about how to create opportunities for survivors to get together, to be able to share those lessons learned and to be able to draw on each other as a wealth of information and knowledge and lived experience.
So just some things I want to leave you all with. I think it’s important when we talk about mass shootings, and again, I would never diminish the importance of them. They are incredibly detrimental and have a widespread impact, but they are among the most statistically rare forms of gun violence in our nation. So it’s very important that we’re planning for all threats and seeking to address all types of gun violence. It’s really important that we focus our efforts on the policies that are backed by evidence. Too often we tend to dive, especially with mass shootings, into policies that are very emotional, products that make us feel better because we can see something’s being done, but it’s not necessarily supported by evidence. So given the resources that we have in our country, it’s best to make sure that we’re focusing them in the most useful way. And Emmy, I’ll turn it back to you.
Emmy Betz: Well, wonderful turning, just turning back on. Thank you so much for an overview of what is, I think such a tough topic and one that all of us feel in our daily lives as parents, as community members, and certainly, there’s a real sense of wanting to find solutions. So I’m curious, just before we move on to the next section, if you could talk a little bit about what have been some of the other barriers to widespread implementation and how can policymakers and other stakeholders help overcome these challenges, perhaps especially recognizing the political gridlock around these kinds of topics?
Jaclyn Schildkraut: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think what’s so important is we tend to have a very reactive focus in this country, and we need to do more in the lines of prevention. And certainly, you know as well as I do, that gets challenged by the gun policy conversation to begin with. But there’s so many different things out there that don’t necessarily have to be controversial or solely focused on firearms. Again, we know that threat assessment is such a powerful tool where you can help not only somebody that’s planning the very worst day, but somebody who might be thinking about self-harm, as you mentioned, or maybe in crisis in other ways. And so having that team available where they can pool resources, you always want to have mental health representatives, also law enforcement and legal, having that multidisciplinary team to support those who need it is so instrumental.
And I think one challenge is that we often operate in 51 or 52 different systems. That’s something we see a lot in the lockdown world. So we have no guidance really at the federal level about what lockdown should look like. So we have 50 states and the District of Columbia all doing something different. So I think the more that we can work to standardize, especially based on where the research is guiding us, I think would be helpful in order to make sure everybody is preventing and responding in the most effective manners causing the least amount of harm.
Emmy Betz: And thank you for that. And one additional brief follow up question from an audience member, could you mention, are there any policies that are not effective that we should perhaps be moving away from? And I realize that a lack of evidence is not the same as something showing that in fact is not effective. Yeah.
Jaclyn Schildkraut: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think most of the things that have been out there, because mass shootings are such a small base rate, it makes it really difficult to show effective versus non-effective. So that’s where you have to start relying on some more of the contextual elements. I think one of the policies that has raised some concern and hesitation about whether it would need at school is armed teachers. So if you look at armed teacher policies and you look at, let’s say comparatively law enforcement and how often they’re accurately firing their weapons in stressful situations, the evidence for law enforcement would suggest that teachers would be less likely to be more effective. But do we have anything that says armed teachers would or would not be effective? Not really. We’ve had about 105 school shootings in the last 55 years, and so it makes it really difficult to have a large enough sample to do meaningful analysis on.
Emmy Betz: Thank you for that, and hopefully, we’ll have some more Q and A time at the end. Please keep putting questions in the Q and A box from the audience. But next, I want to turn it over to Kerri. We’re going to change directions a little bit in terms of type of violence, and I will let her take it from here.
Kerri Raissian: Okay. Let me just get my screen situated. Sorry, lots of boxes there. Okay. So hello everyone and thank you. Thank you Emmy, and thank you for being here. So my role is a little bit different in that I did not author a paper in the special issue, but I’m going to talk about community gun violence trends and solutions, which is something that many of the papers focused on. So I’m going to also talk a little bit about the solutions that were presented across many papers in this presentation. So let me start with just getting a definition as best we can of what is community gun violence. This is similar to mass shootings, and then it can be a little tricky to get a definition of some of these phenomenon, but let me try.
So community gun violence first and foremost is usually defined as interpersonal gun violence. So that means that there’s a victim and a perpetrator diad, at least one of each. This is violence that is perpetrated among people that do not share an intimate or family relationship. Violence typically occurs in public spaces, most often in cities, is where we’re the most typically thinking about this or having it in our policy conversation when we use the phrase community gun violence. And another factor that’s really important to understand is, especially when thinking about root causes and solutions, is this is often due to historical factors, current day policies, social and economic inequality, racism, and other structural barriers that simply must be addressed if we’re going to have structural long-term effects of reducing this kind of violence. So I just want to lay a little bit of groundwork with trends in firearm deaths. So this is all firearm deaths. The source of this is a publication from Johns Hopkins and accounting of a public health crisis.
The top red line is the firearm death rate over the past four years. Then the blue dash line are suicide rates, and then the lighter blue solid line are homicide rates. And what I hope you can see is that suicide, as Emmy mentioned at the start, is the most common form of gun violence, gun death, but that homicides contribute a really large and substantial portion of that as well. And in particular, one of the things that people have been alarmed about is that that line has been increasing at a really fast rate, especially in what we think of as this pandemic years or 2020 and 2021. We’ve seen an alarming increase in homicide, which is disproportionately happening in America’s cities.
Not only is it disproportionately happening in a particular place, community gun violence is disproportionately happening among a certain demographic of people. It disproportionately impacts black Americans. These slides are going to show you numbers and the rates of disproportionate effect of black Americans, but I want to highlight that this disproportionate effect is even more among black youth. So black teens, young men, ages 15 to 34 account for 2% of the total population in the United States, but they account for 36% of all gun homicide fatalities. In addition, as Emmy mentioned, there’s huge geographic variation in where gun violence happens. So someone living in Massachusetts is far less than someone living in Mississippi to experience gun violence. In fact, a person in Mississippi is 10 times more likely to experience gun violence than a person living in Massachusetts. Oh, have I been on mute this whole time?
Emmy Betz: No, we can hear you.
Kerri Raissian: Okay, good. I just saw a little mute button on my thing and I was like, oh dear. Okay, moving on and panic attack averted. Gun violence is also the leading cause of death for children and teens ages one to 19 in the United States. If we think about how often that occurs among black teens, 51% of all deaths for black teens aged 15 to 19 are attributed to a gun. Here on the right is, there was recently a mass shooting in Philadelphia for the 4th of July, and those victims were people of color, young men of color. And one of the things I also want to point out that I think is important to also talk about is the overlap that I think we’re seeing between mass shootings and community gun violence. We’re seeing these lines less clear and less distinct, which is something that as Jackie was talking about, we really need to bring these forms of scholarship together because a mass shooting and community gun violence we have typically talked about as being distinct, but I think that’s becoming unfortunately less so.
Many newspapers have had titles such as this that would imply that community gun violence is going down. So halfway through 2023 shootings are down and more killings are solved, but trauma persists. That says, this is also in Philadelphia, though notice this is July 3rd and the mass shooting happened on July 4th. More than 900 people have been shot in Philadelphia. So over the part of this year, which is a 20% decrease compared with the same time last year. So gun violence is down from historically high levels. However, I’ll show this graph and then I’ll come back to that point. It’s still very high relative to ‘2018, ‘2019, and ‘2020. So it’s coming down, but it’s still high relative to what are historically high baselines and unacceptably high levels. The other thing that I want to point out that we’re not going to be able to talk about in this webinar is that, and Jackie’s presentation certainly touched on this, those who are not shot or killed are also victimized by gun violence. Those that are left behind.
Survivors of community gun violence are often women. Women, mothers, wives, girlfriends, daughters, et cetera, whose fathers, brothers, sons are disproportionately killed, whose lives are ended too early. If you are interested more on this phenomenon, I would refer you to the work of Brooklyn Hitchens, who done some really powerful work about how women in cities are affected by community gun violence, though they are not necessarily the direct victims of gun homicide.
All right, so that’s community and gun violence, very brief and probably not sufficient overview, but now I want to talk to you about some of the solutions that we presented in the Annals or the authors of that journal presented. So the first is a paper by Bugs, [inaudible 00:31:16], Schwartz and Lund, which basically says, we need to address the social determinants of health. We need to get at the root causes of community gun violence in order to really have some upstream interventions and long-lasting effect of our interventions.
In order to do that, we have to recognize that this violence does not happen in a vacuum. We may want to assume that our cities are insular, but they exist in a larger ecosystem. And as Jackie pointed out, sometimes 51 ecosystems. We have to address the concentrated and major underinvestment in our communities, our urban communities, especially. We have to address legal estrangement, specifically thinking about over-policing and mass incarceration of our communities, particularly our black and brown communities. We have to address that policies such as standard ground laws and stop and search disproportionately lead to black deaths and they fail to reduce harm. In addition to the Bugs paper, I would also refer you to the Donahue paper in the journal, and we have to understand that there’s a deadly cycle that further burdens community plagued by firearm violence. And that is that if I consider myself to have a high victimization rate of firearm death, I may self arm myself so that I can protect myself. If I don’t think the police are going to protect me, I may in fact self-harm, which is going to create a deadly cycle.
I don’t have time to go through this entire graphic, it’s in the Bugs paper, but I’m hoping to just visually illustrate how complex this process between governance and this impact of inequity in health is. And this is really underscoring that this does not happen in a vacuum and really requires systemic investment and intervention. Another popular or gaining in popularity intervention are hospital-based violence intervention programs, and the Webster, Richardson, Myerson, Bill and [inaudible 00:33:28] paper addresses our current research and understanding of what are commonly called HVIP, and that’s how I will refer to them as HVIP. So HVIP often begin with a bedside connection between a credible messenger and a gunshot victim in an emergency department. So someone is shot, they’re being treated for their gunshot wound, and the fear is that there may be some type of trying to retaliate for this gunshot wound, and so someone comes a credible messenger to try to prevent that further violence.
So there have been some studies of HVIP programs, and the Webster paper looks at seven randomized controlled trials and six observational studies. And what they find is that the evidence from HVIPs is that these are encouraging, but we don’t have definitive findings that this is definitely a program that works. And so they suggest more of a lot of things, and here’s what they suggest more of. The authors suggest more partnership with street outreach. Often those are the credible messengers. They suggest more collaborations with relocation assistance. If a gunshot victim is in critical danger, they suggest that we may need to relocate them. The use of behavioral change methods that we need to hire, train, and support credible messengers in HVIPs, this is incredibly draining and exhaustive work, and we need to support those workers doing this important work and that we need to train on data collection and evaluation so that we can better refine our programs and know what works and what doesn’t, and so that we can continuously be in an improving cycle.
I also want to highlight a paper that looked at policing and how policing can, and in fact must be part of the solution. And this is the paper by Bragga, Cook and Douglass. And what they say is that first we really have to acknowledge the fraught relationships between communities of color and police. This comes out in several of the papers in the journal, starting with the Bugs paper, really thinking about over policing of cities and as well as the HFIP paper. So we have to recognize that relationship and we have to make a real and concerted effort to repair that relationship. But it is also true that police are a civilized alternative to vigilante justice. The exact vigilante justice that the HFIP paper is concerned about. The exact reason that these credible messengers exist and respond to the emergency department is because there’s a fear of vigilante justice, one of the primary reasons.
And so if not the person or the community that’s been harmed, who? And the answer, the civilized alternative is to the police. But they can only do that to the extent that they are successful in delivering justice to serious criminals. And the Bragga and Cook paper delineates a number of ways that they think that that can happen. They note that the risk of vigilante justice is particularly high in the context of constitutional carry environment and low regulation of firearms. It’s the exact idea that if a person has easy access to firearms, that they may use those firearms either correctly in self-defense or incorrectly either in perpetrating violence or in an unintentional or accidental shooting that is simply making our communities more dangerous.
There are two major recommendations, is that violence is usually concentrated among a core group of serious high offenders, often in hotspots. And those areas need an influx of policing to keep those areas safer and that we have to address low shooting clearance rates. So what this means is often, either two types of gun injuries, fatal gun injuries, which have much higher clearance rates or police solving the crime versus non-fatal shooting rates. And unfortunately, non-fatal shooting rates are less often solved by the police and the Bragga and Cook and Douglas paper recommends concentrating additional resources to solve non-fatal shootings.
And finally, very consistent with what the Bugs paper says is that these prevention strategies cannot happen in a vacuum. And in fact, they must draw on public health, social welfare and criminal justice evaluation to be effective in communities that they serve.
So some challenges, opportunities and takeaways. I think the first, and this is throughout the entire journal as we think about all kinds of gun violence, is that the United States has a unique context. We have an increasing level of guns among new and conventional populations. By that we are seeing women and communities of color buy firearms at an increasing rate. We have a legal framework that prevents certain evidence-based policies. We won’t be able to talk about that much in today’s webinar, but it will certainly be large theme of the July 20th webinar. But we have a lot of state level variation. So some states experience this much more than others, and we can learn from the states with low rates as well as the states of high rate.
We have record levels of community gun violence which are starting to come down. We should be focusing on why that’s happening and what’s working and how those new policies are dedicated to preventing gun violence. And finally, we must continue to implement both policy and non policy solutions to prevent and interrupt gun violence. So I will stop there and turn it back over to Emmy.
Emmy Betz: Great. Thank you so much for a really comprehensive but brief overview of what’s in the journal in the articles. And as a reminder to everyone listening, the links are in the chat box and all of those articles are open access. Question for you, this is coming from an audience member, Kerri. So the question is about how we balance where funding goes and thinking about effectiveness. And so the questions from Philadelphia and the idea that the city is putting a lot of resources into things like anti-gun violence programming, although it’s not always clear if they’re effective, whereas then some of the small grassroots organizations have almost no funding even though we think that the programs might be effective. Could you just speak a little bit to some of those dynamics maybe as both a researcher and someone with a policy frame of mind?
Kerri Raissian: Yeah, sure. So I’m on the Connecticut’s commission for community gun violence prevention intervention. And we struggle with this question a lot thinking about funding and how to fund programs. I think the answer is both. We need to be funding both types of programs, large programs as well as small grassroots programs. But I think the other real answer here, and as I think about public policy and public administration is we need to encourage those programs to not be so separate. We need to encourage those programs to think about ways to harness collective resources and synergies, both with where it makes sense, existing government agencies, that may be the police, that may be departments of public health, that may be hospital and emergency departments like your own, Emmy, depending on where trust is and what that makes sense for the community.
But I think the real answer here is that we need to be evaluating all programs and we need to be evaluating them rigorously. That’s really, I think the biggest challenge with grassroots programs is that grassroots programs don’t necessarily have the technical expertise to be able to demonstrate their effectiveness. So you said we think they’re knowing, they’re working. I admit we should know they’re working, right? We should work with those programs to figure out how to evaluate their programs, how to track outcomes that make sense to them, that don’t just come from the programs, but come from the communities and what makes sense for the communities and folks that they’re working with. Because my definition of a program working may not be the same, is that a person living in that community’s definition and their definition is the one that should really guide and motivate these programs.
So I think the answer is also we should work on knowing that they’re working and we should work together and really look for synergies. So it’s not so much a question of zero-sum game and funding this program, which means I can’t fund this program, just like this journal is multidisciplinary, I think we’ve got to work across and not be so siloed in lots of dimension, and that includes service delivery. I hope that answers the question in the 30 seconds I have.
Emmy Betz: Yeah. And I will take the opportunity to give a shout-out to my state, actually not for anything I did, but we now have state funding in a state office of gun violence prevention, and a lot of their funding is going directly to community grassroots organizations, but with an evaluation plan and with providing that technical expertise and importantly also acknowledging the well-founded trust concerns that many communities have around data collection and so forth. So I think that idea of, again, a state level or even city level trying to support these organizations but also get that effectiveness data is I hope, a way forward. And now moving forward, I’m going to turn it over to Jen for our last presentation, and then we’ll have some Q and A at the end. Over to you, Jen.
Jennifer Paruk: Thank you. Can you see my screen?
Emmy Betz: Yep, it looks good.
Jennifer Paruk: Okay, great. Thanks. All right. So yeah. So today I’m going to talk about firearm intimate partner violence. And in doing so, I’m going to talk about how firearm intimate partner violence is also tied in with firearm violence against others and with mass shootings. And then we’ll focus on some of the strategies to respond to intimate partner violence and we go into detail much more in the paper. So first, just want to say that intimate partner victims report that firearms have a unique dangerousness compared to other weapons. Intimate partner victims are more likely to be frightened after an incident if a firearm was used compared to if a different weapon was used. And when an abusive partner has a firearm, a majority of victims report that this makes them feel less safe. Approximately four and a half million women alive in the US today have been threatened by an intimate partner with a firearm.
And approximately 1 million women alive today in the US have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner. Victims report that this non-fatal firearm abuse can have serious consequences. For example, some victims need medical care. Victims also report feeling fearful and concern for their safety or having nightmares or intrusive thoughts and missing work and school. Turning to fatal firearm incident partner violence and violent relationships. When an abusive male has access to a firearm, the likelihood of him killing his female partner increases 400%. And the most common weapon used in intimate partner homicides is a firearm.
In intimate partner homicides. It’s not just the intimate partner who’s killed. Sometimes when the perpetrator uses a gun in an intimate partner homicide, then they’re more likely to kill more people than if they had used another weapon. A study of intimate partner homicide events found that nearly 30% of these homicide incidents resulted in multiple deaths. About half of the additional homicides outside of the intimate partner were children or other family members of the intimate partner and other victims include the intimate partner’s new partner, coworkers, friends, other people at the scene including law enforcement. And in a small percentage of these intimate partner homicide events, the shooter shoots multiple people and in some cases, [inaudible 00:46:18] shoots four or more people making it the homicide, a mass shooting.
So one study analyzed all of the mass shootings from 2014 to 2019 and found that in 59% of the mass shootings, at least one of the fatal or non-fatal victims was an intimate partner or family member. Sometimes when people think about mass shootings, they only think about shootings that happen in public places or in cases that they see in the news. And Jackie did a great job talking about public mass shootings. And so here we’re talking like some mass shootings occur also in the home. Some of these mass shooters have histories of domestic violence. So even before shooting their families or partners, in the study that I was a part of, we looked at the histories of people who had committed mass shootings and we looked to see if there was any domestic violence in their histories. And in 38% of these mass shooting cases, the shooter or at least one of the shooters, in cases with multiple shooters had this history.
This brings up the idea of intervention that once we know someone is at risk for harming others, then we can intervene to prevent firearm injury. This is also what Jackie was saying, that if we know there is this risk, then we can intervene. And so in the paper, in the special issue, we go into detail on some of the strategies, and I’m just going to quickly talk about three here. First, in the paper we talk about domestic violence restraining orders. So federal law orders that those who are under a final domestic violence restraining order and that have a certain relationship status with the victim, they’re prohibited from firearm purchase and possession. Many states also extend this firearm prohibition to ex dating partners and other relationships and to temporary orders. And some states also include relinquishment provisions in their laws, which specified that the person under restraining order has to relinquish their firearms and how they should do that, specifically.
Second criminal convictions. In the paper we talk about criminal convictions. So all felony convictions carry a firearm restriction. So if an intimate partner perpetrator is convicted of a felony, they can’t purchase or possess a firearm. If the perpetrator is convicted of a misdemeanor for domestic violence under federal law, they’re also prohibited from firearms. And some states also prohibit these convicted of domestic violence from firearm possession. In addition, some states also prohibit those who are convicted of violence from firearms. So even if an intimate partner perpetrator isn’t prohibited through a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction, they might be prohibited from firearms through a conviction under a broader definition of violence.
And finally, EPOs are another strategy to respond to intimate partner violence. 21 states have passed EPO laws. EPOs are civil orders, so similar to domestic violence restraining orders and EPOs prohibit someone from firearms for a temporary period of time when they’re at risk of harming themselves or others. And so to get an EPO, first, someone has to file a petition and all of the 21 states with EPO laws, law enforcement can file a petition. And in 15 states, family members and household members can also file. So in these states, if a family member does not want to get law enforcement involved, they could file for an EPO on their own. Some states also allow select others to file, including medical professionals or employers. And so in that EPO petition, the petitioner explains how that person’s at risk of harming themselves or others. And if the order is granted that person is prohibited from firearms for a temporary period of time, typically a year. And so as I said, we go into detail about these strategies much more in the paper, and you’re welcome to check out that paper.
Emmy Betz: Wonderful. Thanks Jen. And then we’ll get everybody back on in a second. But first question for you, in terms of.. I know you were talking mostly about extreme risk orders in the context of intimate partner violence, can you just talk very briefly about how they’re used in other situations as well, including non-intimate partner threats or suicide threats?
Jennifer Paruk: Yes. And so Jackie mentioned how they can be used for mass shootings. So as part of a study that analyze EPOs from six states, which you know about as well. And so in that study of EPOs from six states, we found that 10% of all of the EPOs were being filed after a mass shooting threat. And so sometimes, as Jackie was saying, people will tell someone about their plans to commit a shooting, giving us opportunity for intervention. So for an example, there was one EPO petition where the person called the high school making threats causing the high school to go into lockdown and EPO petitions filed. And so as researchers, we don’t know how many of these threats would’ve turned into mass shootings without that EPO, but even if those EPOs prevented even just a few percentage of those mass shootings, they saved lives.
Emmy Betz: Great. Thank you. I’m going to invite the other speakers on. We have a couple of questions and I first want to just say thank you again, but I also want to just call out for the listeners. There’s a question that’s a really good question in the Q and A, but I’m not actually going to ask anyone to answer it because I think it’s really hard, this question which we all I think, about every day, which is given our political historical cultural context, what could or should happen in terms of weapons restrictions in the United States or changes in the Second Amendment?
I’m actually not going to ask anybody to answer that. I’m not sure I can even answer that. I have no crystal ball in terms of where things are going to go. But I will say, and I’ll preface my question then by saying my view on this is, I think for any policy that we’re talking about, we really need to be engaging with affected communities to get their input on it, both on the specific writing, but also the implementation of it. So I’m curious if maybe we can go around, if you could each comment a little bit in the area that you were talking about, perhaps thinking about how could we do a better job engaging communities or stakeholders in the development of policies that might be effective. So getting at the policy question, but also thinking about the engagement piece. And we’ll start with Jackie.
Jaclyn Schildkraut: I think that that’s such a very important and valuable question. I think I’ve been pretty fortunate to be able to do this in my own little corner of the world by getting to work in the fifth-largest school district here in the state and being able to see, do lockdowns work, how are they working? And that’s an experience we don’t often get as researchers to have unrestricted access to a school district. And through that work has led me to connect with policymakers not only within Syracuse but across the state.
I think when it comes to mass shootings, and I said this in my presentation, I think that the biggest challenge is that there’s so many more prevalent forms of gun violence that statistically speaking, that the interest or inquiry into it is very short-lived, and it’s usually after one that is highly lethal, makes the news. And so I think we need to just do a better job in this country, not only with mass shootings, but that’s my specific area, of preventing and responding and thinking today how we prevent tomorrow from happening rather than responding in two days to what happened tomorrow.
Emmy Betz: Thanks. How about over to Kerri?
Kerri Raissian: So first I’m going to say, I’m less pessimistic than you. I do think tighter restrictions are possible, but perhaps not in the way we commonly think about them. I actually think there are some things that do actually seem to have a lot of support from people that evidence-based, such as universal background checks. There are studies that 90% of any… Depending on the study, but a large majority of American support universal background checks. And I think that would go a long way to helping our gun violence problem. That’s not the question you asked me, so, sorry. I just think we need more synergy between interventions. We have to recognize… I’m also going to caveat this with, I’m going to assume that the major disinvestment in communities is not going to be fixed overnight. So this is more like an interim solution, if you will.
So Daniel Webster, who’s an author on one of the papers that I mentioned tweeted out today about the Brooklyn Homes mass shooting in Baltimore, where the Safe Street workers had left the gathering about an hour before the mass shooting happened. And Daniel’s tweet was something to the effect of the violence interrupters, which is what the Safe Street workers are compliments to the police. They’re not substitutes. There’s no way that the Safe Streets workers’ as dedicated, as earnest, as trained, as effective as they are, could possibly be appropriate in a well armed crowd. And we have to have policy and government as well as community interventions working together. I think that’s the only way that you get to the funding and investment that’s needed as well as the voice and then moving towards a position of creating trust. That’s the short term, but it’s also a long-term answer, right? That’s also not going to happen overnight, but I think it’s the first thing we need to start working on.
Emmy Betz: Jen, go ahead.
Jennifer Paruk: Yeah, thanks. I was just talking about implementation, especially in terms of EPO laws. A majority of these EPO laws were passed after 2018, and so we’re really learning who are filing these EPOs. And there’s so much we are learning that implementation really matters. And so after a state passes an EPO law, it’s important to educate the public on what EPOs are, who can file them, what the process is. And so the study in California that was surveying the residents, a majority of the survey participants had not heard of the EPO law. And so EPOs can’t have this effect if they’re not being used and implemented. And so it’s really important to focus on that knowledge and training piece as well, I think.
Emmy Betz: Right. Thank you. I know we’re almost out of time. I’m going to try to squeeze in one last short question before I turn it back over I think to Kerri for some final thought or Richard for some final thoughts and reminders. Can we talk about gender briefly? So if each of you could just comment briefly on the work you’re doing or the area we’re talking about and how gender fits in, whether it’s in epidemiology or thinking about prevention intervention approaches.
Jaclyn Schildkraut: Yeah. It probably comes as no surprise that 95% of mass public shooters are men. And I constantly get asked why that is. And I think it follows a larger trajectory about what we know with homicide that involves a firearm. Typically, women use other methods of lethality than firearms, which is where I think that that comes into play. I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve tended to focus, I think, less on the offenders and more on the event context and the circumstances because not to sound pessimistic either, but I think one of the things that we know is, to quote Jurassic Park, “life finds a way,” and if somebody is to determined enough to do something, there’s not much you can do to change their mind. So how can you put up layers and obstacles in front of them?
So I think when we look at the body of scholarship in mass shootings, a lot of it focuses on aggrieved entitlement and toxic masculinity and such. That’s not something that I’ve personally looked into. So I think certainly, there’s a lot of root causes, but I think we have to be very careful, especially with something that is so rare, like mass shootings not to over predict because there’s a lot of men who are toxically masculine or who have a greed entitlement the same way. There’s a lot of people with mental health issues and correlation just does not equal causation in this case.
Emmy Betz: Yeah. Kerri or Jen, any brief thoughts to add? I know we’re almost out of time.
Kerri Raissian: The only thing I’ll add is that men have historically been the predominant victims of community gun violence, but that women are a larger demographic in experiencing that victimization as well. And so I know there are some scholars looking at that, and I think that’s a really important part of the conversation. And so my presentation really focused on male victims because that’s historically been the larger share, but women are certainly both direct and indirect victims of community gun violence.
Jennifer Paruk: And I’ll just add really quickly since you’re out time, that women are the [inaudible 01:00:04] of intimate partner, homicide victim, with a firearm.
Kerri Raissian: Well, thank you everyone for this amazing panel and for contributing to the special issue in general. I really appreciate it. Thank you again to the Niskanen Center and to the American Academy of Political and Social Science. We really appreciate you hosting this webinar and supporting our work and continuing this conversation. If you would like to email me or any of the panelists, I’m sure we’d all welcome that, we’re all very Googleable and Richard has put the links into the chat. But you can also go to the Niskanen website, niskanen.org if you have any questions. Thank you so much and hope to see you at the panel or on Twitter. Take care. Thanks so much guys.
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