Closer to Guns: the Role of Street Gangs in Facilitating Access to Illegal Firearms

Criminal offenders often turn to social networks to gain access to firearms, yet we know little about how networks facilitate access to firearms. This study conducts a network analysis of a co-offending network for the City of Chicago to determine how close any offender may be to a firearm. We use a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of urban health 2018-06, Vol.95 (3), p.372-382
Main Authors: Roberto, Elizabeth, Braga, Anthony A., Papachristos, Andrew V.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Crime
Epidemiology
Firearms
Gangs
Guns
Health Informatics
Injury prevention
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Network analysis
Police
Public Health
Regression analysis
Small arms
Social organization
Victimization
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Criminal offenders often turn to social networks to gain access to firearms, yet we know little about how networks facilitate access to firearms. This study conducts a network analysis of a co-offending network for the City of Chicago to determine how close any offender may be to a firearm. We use arrest data to recreate the co-offending network of all individuals who were arrested with at least one other person over an eight-year period. We then use data on guns recovered by the police to measure potential network pathways of any individual to known firearms. We test the hypothesis that gangs facilitate access to firearms and the extent to which such access relates to gunshot injury among gang members. Findings reveal that gang membership reduces the potential network distance (how close someone is) to known firearms by 20% or more, and regression results indicate that the closer gang members are to guns, the greater their risk of gunshot victimization.
ISSN:1099-3460
1468-2869
DOI:10.1007/s11524-018-0259-1