America Under Fire: An Analysis of Gun Violence in the United States and the Link to Weak Gun Laws

In 2013, the Center for American Progress conducted a study to assess the correlation between the relative strength or weakness of a state's gun laws, as measured by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and rates of gun violence in the state across 10 categories of gun violence or gun-related crimes. Consistent with the research, the CAP study found a strong correlation between strong gun laws and lower rates of gun violence.In the 3.5 years since that study, a number of things have changed that warrant revisiting that research. Many states have acted to strengthen their gun laws: Since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, eight states have enacted laws to require universal background checks—bringing the total number of states that have enacted such laws to 18—and 20 states have strengthened their laws to help keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers. Unfortunately, other states have taken the opposite approach, loosening laws regarding where guns may be carried and weakening or eliminating concealed carry permit requirements. In addition, improvements made in the collection of data relating to gun violence now allow more precise tracking of events such as mass shootings and fatal shootings by law enforcement officers.In this report, the authors revisit CAP's 2013 analysis with a revised methodology, some new categories of gun violence, and updated state grades from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The report provides a state ranking across key indicators of gun violence, then uses these rankings to calculate an overall Gun Violence Index score for each state. Using this score, the authors assessed the correlation between the rate of overall gun violence in the state and the relative strength or weakness of each state's gun laws

Pennsylvania Under the Gun: 5 Measures of Gun Violence in the Keystone State

This issue brief explores five aspects of gun violence in Pennsylvania that are especially alarming, unusual, or above the national average:1. Pennsylvania's rate of gun homicides is among the highest in the nation, particularly in communities of color.2. Pennsylvania law enforcement officers are killed with guns at an exceptionally high rate.3. More Pennsylvanians are killed by gun violence than in car accidents annually.4. Pennsylvania is a top supplier of crime guns recovered in other states.5. Pennsylvania women are killed with guns wielded by intimate partners at a high rate

Stolen Guns in America

In the early morning hours of July 5, 2017, New York Police Department officer Miosotis Familia was ambushed as she sat in a marked NYPD command truck with her partner while providing additional security to a Bronx neighborhood after Fourth of July festivities. In an attack that police officials described as an assassination, Officer Familia was fatally shot in the head with a gun that had been stolen in Charleston, West Virginia, four years earlier. Less than a month earlier on the other side of the country, a UPS driver in San Francisco shot and killed three co-workers and injured two others using a gun that had been stolen in Utah. The shooter was also armed with a gun that had been stolen in Napa County, California.Stolen guns pose a significant risk to community safety. Whether stolen from a gun store or an individual gun owner's collection, these guns often head straight into the illegal underground gun market, where they are sold, traded, and used to facilitate violent crimes. Gun theft is not a minor problem in the United States. According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during the four-year period from 2012 to 2015, nearly half a billion dollars' worth of guns were stolen from individuals nationwide, amounting to an estimated 1.2 million guns. Twenty-two thousand guns were stolen from gun stores during this same period. A gun is stolen in the U.S. every two minutes.This problem does not affect all states equally. The rate and volume of guns stolen from both gun stores and private collections vary widely from state to state. From 2012 through 2015, the average rate of the five states with the highest rates of gun theft from private owners—Tennessee, Arkansas, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Alabama—was 13 times higher than the average rate of the five states with the lowest rates—Hawaii, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts. Similarly, from 2012 through 2016, the average rate of the five states with the highest rates of guns stolen from gun stores was 18 times higher than the average rate the five states with the lowest rates.Gun owners and dealers have a substantial responsibility to take reasonable measures to protect against theft and help ensure that their guns do not become part of this illegal inventory. This report analyzes data from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to provide state-by-state data on the frequency with which guns are stolen from licensed gun dealers and individual gun owners in communities across the country. It then offers a number of policy solutions to help prevent future gun thefts

Virginia Under the Gun

This issue brief provides additional context about what is at stake as Virginia voters con-sider which leaders they want to represent them in Richmond. It discusses four aspects of gun violence and gun-related crime in Virginia that are exceptional, unique, or above the national average:1. More Virginians are killed annually by gunfire than in car accidents.2. Virginia is one of the top exporters of crime guns.3. Women are killed with guns by intimate partners at a high rate in Virginia.4. Virginia has been disproportionately affected by mass shootings

Accuracy and fairness – Siamese twins? A Comment on Sarah Summers «Epistemic Ambitions of the Criminal Trial: Truth, Proof and Rights»

The author agrees with Sarah Summers’ view that a criminal judgment in a system of fair justice should be substantively accurate and at the same time should be the result of a fair process. The author argues, however, for keeping these two requirements apart because they are linked to different goals and may in individual cases conflict with each other

A generalised hydraulic performance model for intermittent exercise

Data science advances in sports commonly involve ‘big data’, i.e., large sport-related data sets. However, such big data sets are not always available, necessitating specialised models that apply to relatively few observations. One important area of sport science research that features small data sets is the study of energy recovery during intermittent exercise. In this area, models are typically fitted to data collected from exhaustive exercise test protocols, which athletes can perform only a few times. Recent findings highlight that established recovery models, such as the so-called work-balance models, are too simple to adequately fit observed trends in the data. These models summarise the available energy capacities of an athlete during exercise in a single variable, which is referred to as work balance. In this thesis we revisit a so-called hydraulic performance model and hypothesise that it is able to address the recently highlighted shortcomings of work-balance models. However, current literature has not fully validated the original hydraulic model, because it depends on physiological measures that cannot be acquired at the required precision or quantity. We introduce a generalised interpretation and formalisation of the original hydraulic model that removes its ties to concrete physiological measures. We use evolutionary computation to fit its parameters to an athlete. In this way, we investigate a new hydraulic model that requires the same few data points as work-balance models, but promises to predict recovery dynamics more accurately. To compare the hydraulic model to established work-balance models, we retrospectively apply them to data compiled from previously published studies. The hydraulic model outperforms established work-balance models on all defined metrics, even those that penalise models featuring higher numbers of parameters. However, the more accurate energy recovery predictions of the hydraulic model come at the cost of inaccurate predictions of metabolic responses during exercise, such as oxygen uptake. In conclusion, while the new hydraulic performance model should not be used to predict metabolic responses during exercise, it promises to be a powerful tool for predicting energy recovery. This work carefully positions the new hydraulic model among existing models, with its benefits and limitations. The results render the new hydraulic model a powerful alternative to address the shortcomings of established work-balance models and incentivise further investigation. Data and code are published as open source

Gun Violence Is Having a Devastating Impact on Young People

From 2019 to 2020, gun homicides among children and teenagers rose dramatically. As a result, firearms are now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 1 to 17. In addition, young Americans are suffering from a rapid and devastating rise in school shootings, increasingly mourning the loss of a parent due to firearm-related violence, and experiencing nonfatal gunshot injuries and gunshot threats at an alarming frequency.Despite these concerning trends, some elected officials refuse to protect our youth from gun-related crimes. Instead, they are blocking commonsense gun safety laws and even pushing for counterproductive measures that would further endanger children and teenagers. This must change.