By Rosanna Smart

Background

Despite growing evidence about how state-level firearm regulations affect overall rates of injury and death, little is known about whether potential harms or benefits of firearm laws are evenly distributed across demographic subgroups. In this systematic review, we synthesized available evidence on the extent to which firearm policies produce differential effects by race and ethnicity on injury, recreational or defensive gun use, and gun ownership or purchasing behaviors.

Main body

We searched 13 databases for English-language studies published between 1995 and February 28, 2023 that estimated a relationship between firearm policy in the USA and one of eight outcomes, included a comparison group, evaluated time series data, and provided estimated policy effects differentiated by race or ethnicity. We used pre-specified criteria to evaluate the quality of inference and causal effect identification. By policy and outcome, we compared policy effects across studies and across racial/ethnic groups using two different ways to express effect sizes: incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and rate differences. Of 182 studies that used quasi-experimental methods to evaluate firearm policy effects, only 15 estimated policy effects differentiated by race or ethnicity. These 15 eligible studies provided 57 separate policy effect comparisons across race/ethnicity, 51 of which evaluated interpersonal violence. In IRR terms, there was little consistent evidence that policies produced significantly different effects for different racial/ethnic groups. However, because of different baseline homicide rates, similar relative effects for some policies (e.g., universal background checks) translated into significantly greater absolute differences in homicide rates among Black compared to white victims.

Conclusions

The current literature does not support strong conclusions about whether state firearm policies differentially benefit or harm particular racial/ethnic groups. This largely reflects limited attention to these questions in the literature and challenges with detecting such effects given existing data availability and statistical power. Findings also emphasize the need for additional rigorous research that adopts a more explicit focus on testing for racial differences in firearm policy effects and that assesses the quality of race/ethnicity information in firearm injury and crime datasets.

Inj Epidemiol. 2023; 10: 67.

By V A Pear , J P Schleimer , A J Aubel , S Buggs , C E Knoepke , R Pallin , A B Shev , E Tomsich , G J Wintemute , N Kravitz-Wirtz

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) provide a civil mechanism to temporarily remove firearm access from individuals at high risk of harming themselves or others. Evidence and theory suggest that ERPOs can prevent firearm-related harm, but the policy's impact on racial/ethnic equity is largely unknown. To examine potential inequities by race/ethnicity in public perceptions and use of California's ERPO law, we drew on two complementary data sources: 1) a 2020 state-representative survey of California adults, and 2) ERPO court documents for the first 3 years of policy implementation (2016-2018). Majorities (54-89%) of all racial/ethnic groups reported that ERPOs are at least sometimes appropriate, and 64-94% were willing to ask a judge for an ERPO for a family member. However, Black and Hispanic/Latinx survey participants less often perceived ERPOs as appropriate and were less willing to serve as petitioners, with Black participants citing lack of knowledge about ERPOs and not trusting the system to be fair as their top reasons for unwillingness. Similarly, review of ERPO court documents revealed that no family or household members served as petitioners for Black and Hispanic/Latinx ERPO respondents. Additionally, Black respondents were the least likely to have documented access to a firearm and legal representation in court. Racial/ethnic equity in ERPO use may be improved by reducing barriers to petitioning, incorporating non-law enforcement intervention professionals like behavioral health specialists into the ERPO process, providing legal assistance to respondents and petitioners, and investing in the social safety net.

Prev Med. 2022 Dec;165(Pt A):107181. doi: 10.1016/j.ypmed.2022.107181. Epub 2022 Aug 6. PMID: 35940474.

By Justin Nix and John A. Shjarback

Objectives

To quantify nonfatal injurious police shootings of people and examine the factors associated with victim mortality.

Methods

We gathered victim-level data on fatal and nonfatal injurious police shootings from four states that have such information publicly available: Florida (2009–14), Colorado (2010–19), Texas (2015–19), and California (2016–19). For each state, we examined bivariate associations between mortality and race/ethnicity, gender, age, weapon, and access to trauma care. We also estimated logistic regression models predicting victim mortality in each state.

Results

Forty-five percent of these police shooting victims (N = 1,322) did not die. Black–white disparities were more pronounced in nonfatal injurious police shootings than in fatal police shootings. Overall, Black victims were less likely than white victims to die from their wound(s). Younger victims were less likely to die from their wound(s), as well as those who were unarmed.

Conclusions

Racial and age disparities in police shootings are likely more pronounced than previous estimates suggest.

Policy implications

Other states should strongly consider compiling data like that which is currently being gathered in California. Absent data on nonfatal injurious police shootings–which account for a large share of deadly force incidents–researchers and analysts must be cautious about comparing and/or ranking jurisdictions in terms of their police-involved fatality rates.

PLOS One,  November 10, 2021

By Jennifer Carlson

The summer of 2020 was a summer of mass unrest. Protesting the thousand-plus, disproportionately Black and Indigenous lives taken every year by police violence, millions of Americans mobilized for racial justice and police accountability under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Their message was not new — the Black Lives Matter movement was founded years earlier in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin — but its urgency felt renewed amid egregious cases of anti-Black racism, police violence, growing political polarization, and white supremacist extremism. The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Dion Johnson, and Breonna Taylor — a handful among thousands — yet again spotlighted police complicity with and perpetuation of anti-Black violence, invigorating months of protests and calls for police accountability, police demilitarization, police defunding, and even police abolition. The demands themselves differed in substance; some focused on closing down police departments altogether, while others emphasized the fiscal necessity of redirecting public funding from police to other agencies.1 But the gist of these calls was unanimous: they insist that to transform rather than merely reform the institutions within American society that perpetuate anti-Black racism, police must be decentered as the go-to institution for solving not just problems of crime but social problems more generally. Anti-Black racism within policing is one slice of the entrenched tendency in 20th- and 21st-century America to treat a wide panoply of social problems as problems of crime and bloat the criminal justice system as the catchall state apparatus to address those problems — a dynamic that legal scholar Jonathan Simon describes as “governing through crime.”2 The protests, the demands, and the community organizing of 2020 may have been immediately focused on the criminal justice system, but because that system has so thoroughly penetrated vast realms of American society as a core vector of anti-Black racism, the message carried by the protesters reached far and wide — including gun politics. Often buttressing the well-worn terms of the gun debate, those in favor of increased gun regulations declared that “police violence is gun violence,” while others promoted gun ownership as a way to put the message to “defund the police” into practice. But the challenge that the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests have posed to American gun politics goes far beyond rehashing the usual sides of the gun debate in the key of anti-Black police violence. Rather, this challenge invites those invested in the gun debate to consider their own complicity with the criminal justice system and how, by decentering crime and criminalization within the gun debate, that debate might be transformed. In short, the summer 2020 protests challenge us to imagine anti-racist gun politics.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 10p.

By Bailey K. Roberts, Colleen P. Nofi, Emma Cornell, Sandeep Kapoor, MD, MS-HPPL,b,c,d,e Laura Harrison, MPH,c,d Chethan Sathya

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: In 2020, firearm injuries became the leading cause of death among US abstract children and adolescents. This study aimed to evaluate new 2021 data on US pediatric firearm deaths and disparities to understand trends compared with previous years. METHODS: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research was queried for firearm mortalities in children/adolescents from 2018 to 2021. Absolute mortality, death rates, and characteristics were reported. Death rates were defined per 100 000 persons in that population per year. Death rates across states were illustrated via geographic heat maps, and correlations with state poverty levels were calculated. RESULTS: In 2021, firearms continued to be the leading cause of death among US children. From 2018 to 2021, there was a 41.6% increase in the firearm death rate. In 2021, among children who died by firearms, 84.8% were male, 49.9% were Black, 82.6% were aged 15 to 19 years, and 64.3% died by homicide. Black children accounted for 67.3% of firearm homicides, with a death rate increase of 1.8 from 2020 to 2021. White children accounted for 78.4% of firearm suicides. From 2020 to 2021, the suicide rate increased among Black and white children, yet decreased among American Indian or Alaskan Native children. Geographically, there were worsening clusters of firearm death rates in Southern states and increasing rates in Midwestern states from 2018 to 2021. Across the United States, higher poverty levels correlated with higher firearm death rates (R 5 0.76, P < .001).

Pediatrics, August 21, 2023.

by Lucy C. Sorensen, Montserrat Avila-Acosta, John Engberg, Shawn D. Bushway

U.S. public school students increasingly attend schools with sworn law enforcement officers present. Yet little is known about how these school resource officers (SROs) affect school environments or student outcomes. Our study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design with national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 to estimate the impacts of SRO placement. We construct this discontinuity based on the application scores for federal school-based policing grants of linked police agencies. We find that SROs effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent gun-related incidents. We also find that SROs intensify the use of suspension, expulsion, police referral, and arrest of students. These increases in disciplinary and police actions are consistently largest for Black students, male students, and students with disabilities.''

By John MacDonald , George Mohler , P Jeffrey Brantingham

Gun violence rates increased in U.S. cities in 2020 and into 2021. Gun violence rates in U.S. cities is typically concentrated in racially segregated neighborhoods with higher poverty levels. However, poverty levels and demographics alone do not explain the high concentration of violence or its relative change over time. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the increase in shooting victimization in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles during the 2020-2021 pandemic was concentrated in gun violence hot spots, and how the increase impacted race and ethnic disparities in shooting victimization rates. We find that 36% (Philadelphia), 47% (New York), and 55% (Los Angeles) of the increase in shootings observed during the period 2020-2021 occurred in the top decile of census block groups, by aggregate number of shootings, and that the race/ethnicity of victims in these gun violence hot spots were disproportionately Black and Hispanic. We discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to racial disparities in victimization and place-based efforts to reduce gun violence.

Prev Med 2022 Dec;165(Pt A):107241.

By Nanzi Zheng , Karen M Abram , Leah J Welty , David A Aaby , Nicholas S Meyerson , and Linda A Teplin

Question What are the incidence rates of nonfatal firearm injury and firearm mortality in youths who have been involved with the juvenile justice system?

Findings This 25-year longitudinal cohort study (n = 1829) found that youths involved with the juvenile justice system had up to 23 times the rate of firearm mortality as the general population; rates varied by sex, race and ethnicity, and age. Sixteen years after detention, more than one-quarter of Black and Hispanic males had been injured or killed by firearms.

Meaning These findings suggest that reducing firearm injury and mortality in high-risk youths and young adults requires a multidisciplinary approach involving legal professionals, health care professionals, educators, street outreach workers, and public health researchers.

By  Aziz Huq, Robert Vargas & Caitlin Loftus

From May 29, 2020, onward, the City of Chicago witnessed an escalating wave of protests against police violence under the Black Lives Matter (BLM) banner. On one count, some 52,000 people participated in BLM protests in the city. Many hoped that such mobilization “would democratize our politics and embolden our visions for change,” especially when it came to public safety. Yet just over a year later, the Chicago City Council passed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s municipal budget with a $189 million dollar jump in police funding. That budget received support from several Democratic Socialist alderpeople — previously among BLM’s most vociferous supporters — and many progressive activists. No law forced the council’s or the mayor’s hands. Unlike many other jurisdictions, Chicago does not have a “structural entrenchment” of law enforcement arising from an “insulation of urban police departments” through state legislation. To the contrary, earlier in 2021, Governor Jay Pritzker had signed a “sweeping” criminal justice reform bill partly in response to concerns about racial justice. State-level forces, that is, listed in favor of change. What then happened to defuse the momentum of social change in Chicago?

The answer, we contend in this Essay, has in part to do with guns, and in particular the way that we talk about guns. Through increased rhetoric about illegal guns and heightened enforcement of gun possession laws, Chicago’s mayor and police chief have managed to legitimize an increase in policing that widened racial inequalities at a time of unprecedented pressure from activists. In the teeth of sharp criticism from BLM, Mayor Lightfoot deployed a historically enduring set of arguments about gun violence against liberal, reform-minded political competitors. At the same time, her police superintendent pressed for a set of coercive responses that again had at best questionable effects on gun violence even as they more assuredly reinforced racially stratified patterns of law enforcement. The result has been a shift in policing resources that has increased the disparate burden of policing upon Chicago’s Black and Hispanic communities without much evidence of an offsetting public-safety benefit. This echoes experience in similar past periods of social unrest, when Chicago used gun talk to defuse mobilizing energies of social movements. In 2020, as before, officials tendered both regulatory and coercive interventions in response to the perceived problem of gun violence. The former have tended to wither; the latter endure, even if their effect upon actual rates of gun-related crimes is ambiguous at best.

Harvard Law Review Forum [Vol. 135:473, 2022.

By Joseph Blocher & Reva B. Siegel  

  Is racism in gun regulation reason to look to the Supreme Court to expand Second Amendment rights? While discussion of race and guns recurs across the briefs in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 1 it is especially prominent in the brief of legal aid attorneys and public defenders2 who employed their Second Amendment arguments to showcase stories of racial bias in the enforcement of New York’s licensing and gun possession laws. Because this Second Amendment claim came from a coalition on the left, it was widely celebrated by gun rights advocates.3 This Essay argues that the racial justice concerns the public defenders highlight should be addressed in democratic politics rather than in the federal courts. We show that problems to which public defenders point are partly attributable to the Court’s decades-long abdication of equal protection oversight of the criminal justice system — its transformation of equal protection into an instrument for protecting majority  rather than minority rights.4 Actors in democratic politics can enforce equal protection in ways that courts have not and they can enforce equal protection in ways that courts cannot, by coordinating multiple racial justice goals, seeking freedom from gun violence in nondiscriminatory law enforcement and transformed, less carceral approaches to public safety.5 Only democratic actors have the institutional competence to integrate these race-egalitarian aims and to experiment with strategies for achieving them. We highlight jurisdictions where there is debate about the best toolkit to achieve inclusive forms of public safety in an era of rising crime.6 None of this is possible if the Court expands Second Amendment rights in ways that deprive communities of the democratic authority they need to coordinate these various compelling public ends 

Harvard Law Review Forum,  Vol. 135:449  2022.

By The  U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, and later that year, on November 12th, the shooting and killing of Jordan Davis triggered a national controversy over the legislated criminal defense called “stand your ground.” These laws expanded the self-defense principles of the castle doctrine to situations and areas outside the curtilage of a home. It also expanded the principle of self-defense to a lesser justification standard than that of justifiable homicide. The United States Commission on Civil Rights opened its own inquiry on the subject in May 2013, and in October 2014, held a hearing in Florida. The transcript of that hearing forms the main body of that report. Unlike other hearings or briefings, the work of the Commission was conceived as an investigation, on a bipartisan vote made possible by the vote of then-Vice-Chair Abigail Thernstrom.  We are here presented with only the testimony heard in Florida five years ago, as well as research and public information subsequent, but that does not prevent members of this Commission to state their observations on an issue that continues to trouble our nation to this day. And so my statement begins. The question we asked then, and we ask now, continues to be: do Stand Your Ground laws have an unacceptable racial bias in their application in the criminal justice system. What we do know, and what we cannot ignore, is that the same racial biases that have permeated our criminal justice system cannot be separated from this issue. When you consider the racial disparities in selective prosecution and sentencing that have been amply documented in the literature is it any wonder that a law like Stand Your Ground, which in effect grants both powers to an individual under the guise of self-defense would suffer similar maladies?

Washington, DC: USCCR, 2020. 386p.

By Robert VerBruggen  

When the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set off riots, we knew very little about the true number of people killed by American law enforcement. But since that time, private actors have stepped up efforts to count such killings comprehensively—and to collect some basic details about each incident. These data, along with agency-specific information furnished by police departments, have facilitated a massive amount of research into an important question: whether there is racial bias in police officers’ use of lethal force. This report summarizes several major lines of work on this question. The simplest studies merely compare racial groups’ rates of police-killing deaths with their rates of crime. Other studies meticulously account for the situational factors of each case, ask whether black officers are less likely than white officers to kill black suspects, analyze police-shooting rates geographically, or even put officers in simulation exercises to see how they respond to suspects of different races.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2022. 32p.

By Michael Siegel

In 2017, there were 14,542 firearm-related homicide deaths in the United States. Despite constituting only 13% of the U.S. population, Black persons made up 59% of these victims. Many states have addressed the problem of firearm-related homicide by enacting stronger firearm laws. While many studies have already been conducted on the effectiveness of various firearm laws in reducing overall population homicide rates, the vast majority of these studies do not distinguish between victims of different races/ethnicity. In failing to do so, these studies assume that state-level firearm laws produce homogeneous effects, even while Black communities continue to bear the undue burden of firearm violence. The purpose of this research was to fill this critical gap by rigorously evaluating the differential impact of state-level firearm laws on homicide rates among White, Black, and Hispanic populations. This project sought to answer two major research questions: (1) Is there heterogeneity in the effect of different state firearm laws on homicide rates by race/ethnicity? (2) To what extent are any differences in the impact of firearm laws by race/ethnicity explained by contextual differences in homicide victimization across urban vs. non-urban settings, as opposed to differences among racial groups per se?

Report to the U.S. National Institute of Justice, 2020. 13p.