Economics of gun violence

The United States leads the world in gun-related injuries and deaths, and mass shootings in schools and social venues are all too frequent. Activists push for stricter gun laws as they place blame on the government, opposing social parties, and schools, in addition to gun manufacturers, organizations, and owners. The goal of this paper is to bring together essential details related to gun violence and provide an economic structure for analysis of the topic for the purpose of deterring gun violence. Previous research on gun violence provides a patchwork of information concentrated mainly on gun control and hand-picked statistics to further a social agenda. This paper brings together the facts related to gun-related violence in homicides, legal interventions, and suicides in a concise summary of the history, legal instruments, and politics of the issue in the United States. It then builds on the economics of crime research by Gary Becker (1968) and George Stigler (1970) to develop a model of the economics of gun violence, which include the actors involved, the costs and benefits affecting their decisions, and potential incentives to decrease gun violence. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Violent Death Reporting System and Nonfatal Injury Data from 2000-2015 on deaths and nonfatal injuries attributed to gun violence as well as complementary data sets are used to empirically test the economic model using Pearson correlations and multiple regression techniques. The information and economic model presented in this paper provide an enhanced understanding of the economic underpinnings of gun violence and offer a new tool for creating effective policy to decrease the incidence and prevalence of gun violence.