MaverickNH
NES Member
Policing Guns: Why Gun Violence Is Not (Just) a Public Health Problem
"In practice, when it comes to prevention of criminal misuse of guns, public health scholars tend to ignore or minimize what we argue is the most important targeted prevention capacity: the criminal justice system’s ability to arrest, punish, and incapacitate shooters. The potential importance of this capacity is most intuitively evident when it fails. Consider the weekend of August 4 [2018] in Chicago in which a total of 74 people were shot (including a stretch with 30 shot over three hours). Just one of the shooters was arrested. "
There's some interesting stuff here. Fear of police, arrest, prosecution, jail *and* armed citizens is a powerful combination. Balancing the police factor is the tricky part - either too much or too little police doesn't work without enough armed citizens.
"In practice, when it comes to prevention of criminal misuse of guns, public health scholars tend to ignore or minimize what we argue is the most important targeted prevention capacity: the criminal justice system’s ability to arrest, punish, and incapacitate shooters. The potential importance of this capacity is most intuitively evident when it fails. Consider the weekend of August 4 [2018] in Chicago in which a total of 74 people were shot (including a stretch with 30 shot over three hours). Just one of the shooters was arrested. "
There's some interesting stuff here. Fear of police, arrest, prosecution, jail *and* armed citizens is a powerful combination. Balancing the police factor is the tricky part - either too much or too little police doesn't work without enough armed citizens.