The Influence of Gun Legislation on Violence and Crime

Research Study Article Analysis
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Research Study Article Analysis
For the purpose of this assignment, I will analyze Reeping et al.’s (2019) paper which focused on the influence of gun legislation on violence and crime. The authors argue that despite the increasing prevalence of violence in America, as well as the apparent inordinate incidence of gun violence in certain states compared to other states, fairly enough studies have been conducted to investigate state-level variables that may be associated with mass shootings. Gun control legislation can reduce the number of mass shootings that take place. The diversity of state gun laws that have arisen as a result of the lack of national gun legislation in the United States presents a viable opportunity for research. Although former scholars have shown that more liberal gun restrictions are linked with increased rates of murder and suicide, Reeping et al. contend that no studies have examined if state gun policies, in general, have a direct association with the prevalence of mass shootings (Reeping et al., 2019). Additionally, gun ownership is a critical factor to examine in the context of gun restrictions since increased statewide gun ownership may lead to the approval of the legislation, and legislation may result in increased statewide gun ownership being improved. According to the researchers, mass shootings in the United States are believed to be associated with the restrictiveness or permissiveness of guns’ legislation or gun ownership. Essentially, significant uncertainty exists over the influence of firearm policies and possession on mass shootings in the United States.
The researchers carried out cross-sectional, time-series research to determine whether state gun controls, as well as local firearm ownership, were associated with mass shootings. The analyses included several metrics of local-level attributes: median family income, percentage of high school graduates, percentage of single-parent households, percentage of poverty, percentage of unemployment, percentage of incarceration, and percentage of white people (Reeping et al., 2019). Except for the imprisonment rate collected from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, they got all the variables from the American Community Survey at the United States Census Bureau. They also included the year as a fixed variable in all analyses to compensate for other time-varying factors. The authors obtained state-by-state tallies of mass shootings using the Supplementary Homicide Reports from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting System (1998–2015) (Reeping et al., 2019). These mass shootings were examined as a whole and classified according to whether they were domestic or non-domestic in origin. Average state leniency-strictness ratings and average national weapons ownership percentages were calculated using all available data from the accessible years. The Scatter plots and Pearson correlation coefficients between these regional rigidness and liberality ratings and firearms ownership rates, as well as the demographic frequency of mass shootings, were calculated across all states and all years of data collection (Reeping et al.,...