Today on FairWarning (an excellent site, btw) there was a good news announcement that the governor of Colorado signed a bill restricting firearms. As of July 1, background checks would be required for private and online gun sales and ammunition magazines holding more than 15 rounds would be banned. That is the good news. The bad […]
Category: Gun violence
The gun debate and domestic violence
A controversial article pertains to two themes highlighted in Injury Prevention blogs this year – violence against women and gun ownership. On March 17, the New York Times published the article “In Some States, Gun Rights Trump Orders of Protection”, with reporting contributed by Griff Palmer and research contributed by Kristen Millares Young and Jack Styczynski. The lengthy article cites […]
A round up of gun control stories from the US (Dec 2012-March 2013)
This understandably hot topic dominates the news I receive from various sources in the US, especially the major news media. I cannot do justice to the details in each of these reports but have tried to offer a précis of the main points in several of these. Guns don’t stop mass shootings Late in December, […]
Learning from the experience of gun control in Australia
Simon Chapman points out that his 2006 paper in Injury Prevention “Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms: faster falls in firearm deaths, firearm suicides, and a decade without mass shootings,” was downloaded over 80,000 time in December 2012, presumably following the tragedy in Sandy Hook. The article usage statistics for this paper (as for all the papers we publish) […]
The NRA’s war on gun science
The central public policy question — does gun control save lives? — is impossible to answer without solid research. But there has been much less research in the US since 1996 as a result of the gun lobby’s success in denying federal funds for scientific research into gun violence. In spite of the courageous stand […]
The magical land of NRAnia
I may soon have to apologize for the number of blogs related to the gun control issue in the U.S., but its importance cannot be underestimated and just now there seems to be a lot to report. So bear with me. What you will see below was sent by a colleague who prefaced the link […]
Mother Jones to assemble “Craziest anti-Obama Gun Reactions”
The link to the website below will take you into the world of the most extreme (and seemingly wackiest) of the opposition to the measures under consideration to prevent further gun massacres. If they were not so grim they would be truly funny. Actually, I admit I find them scary. This is a sample; not […]
Firearm death in US cities – a global perspective
The Atlantic Cities blog has an interesting analysis of firearm homicide rates in US cities compared to the firearm homicide rate of nations traditionally described as “violent.” Results are presented as a graphic. I was stunned by the observation that “if New Orleans was a country,” it would have the second highest firearm death rate in the world. […]
Gun control lessons from Australia
Editors note: On Jan 16 the following appeared on The New York Times Opinion Page. In my view it is a critically important contribution to the gun control debate. John Howard was a brave politician who defied the odds after the rampage in Tasmania when a deranged person using an assault rifle killed 35 people. […]
What questions about gun violence should new research address?
One of the executive actions taken today by President Obama in response to recent mass shootings was to “direct the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” This is a major shift away from federal policy of the last 15+ years which has effectively suppressed funding of public health research into firearm injury and […]