ABSTRACT
The United States has a high level of violence, it has a large number of guns, and very high shares of its homicides are committed with guns. Although the individual-level analysis has the merit of getting closer to the phenomenon, it cannot show what the net overall effect of gun ownership levels is on total rates of violence. Although the measurement of gun availability is probably superior to any previously uses in aggregate-level research, it is not adequate for the purpose of distinguishing gun ownership among more violence-prone subsets of the population from ownership levels in the general public. All of the indicators were more strongly associated with survey measures of handgun ownership than with gun ownership in general. The aggregate level analysis of violent crime rates indicated that the net impact of all the various individual effects of gun possession, among prospective victims and aggressors combined was not significantly different from zero.
