Intelligent Intervention: Assessing Gun Violence Reduction Programs with Quantitative Methods
Date:
In the wake of mass shootings and high profile gun crimes, the media is awash with recommendations of how to prevent future events from occurring. Unfortunately, lack of research funding means these recommendations are rarely assessed rigorously. This can lead to improper distribution of resources and can, in some cases, exacerbate the criminal behavior within a community. If we assume that gun violence and gun crime are analogous to epidemics, we can borrow ideas from the public health and epidemiology to predict the ability of a proposed intervention to reduce gun violence and gun crime. In this presentation, I will show some of the interventions that have been implemented, discuss the current methods of evaluating their successes, and introduce how mathematical and statistical models can be used to improve our responses to gun violence and gun crime in the United States.