Analyzing "the gun"

Individual characteristics that are found to influence gun crimes include race [1, 2], age [3, 4], sex, gang membership [5-7], drug involvement, and juvenile and adult status [5, 7-15]. Gun crimes range from illegal possession [16, 17], unlawfully receiving or transferring a firearm [18], to violent crimes such as robbery and homicide [17, 19]. Characteristics of weapons include types of weapons used in crimes and sources of weapons such as states, dealers, traffickers, and unregulated markets [1, 4, 5, 19-22].

3.3. Analysis

Analysis of gun cases should be guided by conceptual frameworks and related hypotheses. For this study, the hypotheses are based on the conceptual frameworks reviewed earlier, which represent to a large extent the current research and knowledge of gun incidents at the local level. These hypotheses are focused on three basic ideas; namely, (1) individual characteristics are associated with types of weapon offenses and weapons used; (2) police activities in response to gun incidents influence outcomes of their investigations; and (3) situational/contextual variables are related to types of weapon-related offenses. Since the data includes information on suspects' characteristics, police dispatch and investigative activities, and call districts and crime scene characteristics, the analysis included these as independent variables. Dependent variables include offenses, weapon offenses, weapons/forces used, gun types, gun calibers, pistol types, number of weapons recovered, presence of victims, presence of witnesses, suspect resistance to arrest, presence of drug, suspect status, and case status. Apart from weapons/forces used, gun calibers, pistol types, and number of weapons, all dependent variables were dichotomized. Because of the situational nature of some of these variables such as offenses, gun types, weapons/forces used, presence of drugs, and presence of witnesses, they were also used as situational variables to test their effect on suspect status and case status. Additional variables in the dataset are also relevant to the conceptual frameworks and could be used for analysis, but significant amount of missing information precluded them from analysis.

4. Reporting the Findings

The final stage in developing and analyzing a local gun-case database is reporting the findings, which should be guided also by relevant conceptual frameworks and hypotheses. Because of the focus of this paper on the research process and related issues for developing and analyzing a local gun-case database, the operationalization of variables, selection of statistical models, and specific analysis results are not included here. A brief summary of the findings is provided below to give readers a sense of the analysis results and to provide the setting for discussing related issues in the following section. As this paper is not written to make any general claims, the purpose here is to discuss these issues using this particular database as an example. The results should not be used to make inferences about gun crimes in urban areas in general.