Gun Violence Costs Each Household $2,500 a Year - Chicago Crime Lab

[clinotus]

Got this one earlier, had to share:

Crime Lab seeks community partnerships

In addition to the human cost of gun violence, felt so wrenchingly on Chicago’s streets and in its homes, a new report from the University’s Crime Lab examines the social costs that amount to $2.5 billion per year, or roughly $2,500 for every household in the city.

The report sets the stage for a new Crime Lab initiative to find and support innovative ideas for preventing gun violence among young people, then rigorously evaluate the programs to see what works best and can be replicated elsewhere.

Today the Crime Lab is launching a design competition for the Chicago Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence Among School Age Youth. The initiative seeks both promising ideas for reducing gun violence and promoting positive youth development in the city’s highest-crime areas.

The Crime Lab will select the most promising project ideas and invite full proposals from these community partners. The Crime Lab will work closely with one or more winning applicants to raise private funding to implement programs that can be rigorously evaluated by University scholars.

Information on submitting a three-page letter of interest is available at http://crimelab.uchicago.edu.

Jens Ludwig


This effort addresses current gaps in research about effective strategies to reduce gun violence, which a blue-ribbon panel assembled by the National Academy of Sciences noted in a 2004 report. The hope is to partner insights from city agencies, non-profits and faith-based organizations about the nature of the youth gun violence problem and potential remedies with the Crime Lab’s expertise in carrying out rigorous evaluation projects. Such a partnership would generate evidence about what works best and for whom, while providing a rigorous examination of the problem, much like clinical trials found in medicine.

“Gun violence remains a widespread and preventable threat to the lives and health of Chicago youth and families. So many of these deaths and injuries could be avoided if our society put resources behind the most effective interventions,” said Karen Sheehan, a pediatric emergency physician at Children’s Memorial Hospital. “The University of Chicago Crime Lab’s focus on building rigorous evidence about what works and for whom is an important step forward.”

Although cities across the country have launched numerous programs over the years to prevent crime, few have been implemented in a way that can be rigorously evaluated. As a result, researchers and policymakers have had difficulty learning which projects may work, said Jens Ludwig, Director of the Crime Lab, and the McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law and Public Policy.

“Claims of dramatic success are not in short supply, and yet the youth gun violence problem remains,” he said. “The lesson is that progress in addressing gun violence in Chicago, or anywhere, is extremely difficult without guidance about what programs work, for whom, why and how they can be improved.”

Ludwig and his colleagues released a report Tuesday, March 3, entitled “Gun Violence Among School-Aged Youth in Chicago,” which details the scope of the problem. Among its findings:

* Alcohol, mental health issues and school failure are contributing causes to the persistence of gun violence among the city’s youth and provide potential targets for new programmatic interventions.
* The underground market seems to work far less efficiently for guns than for drugs—in part because guns, unlike drugs, are durable goods. These patterns suggest opportunities for enforcement efforts that disrupt the illicit gun market.
* The most vulnerable age for youth to become involved with gangs and violence is early adolescence, when arrests and school dropouts increase.
* Drawing on results from a national study of the costs of gun violence, the researchers determined that the cost of gun violence here in the city of Chicago was $2.5 billion, or about $2,500 per household. Additionally, for each murder, 70 people are either discouraged from moving to Chicago or prompted to move out of the city.

Ludwig is a nationally prominent scholar in the areas of gun policy, youth violence and social policy. Joining him on the project is co-director Harold Pollack, Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration and a prominent public health researcher, and experts on crime and youth violence throughout the University.

A grant from the Joyce Foundation supported the initial work of the Crime Lab. The project also received funding from the School of Social Service Administration and the University’s Office of the Provost. The Crime Lab also has worked intensely with community organizations. Its work is just one example of the University’s significant contribution to addressing the challenges facing urban America.

Source

Perhaps since they are looking for a partner, they could hold hands and walk down the beach with the Brady group.

 

[Admin]

Amazing for a state with such overbearing gun laws too.

 

[Tim111]

Amazing for a state with such overbearing gun laws too.

+1
Whats even more amazing is that the anti's love to ignore the correlation between strict gun laws and high crime rates. Their selective manipulation of the facts are the pinnacle of their self-serving arguments.

 

[EddieCoyle]

Damn, and to think I actually liked him when he played baseball with Foghorn Leghorn...

 

[Admin]

That's not him Jim, the little Chicken Hawk was actually smart.

 

[doobie]

Damn Heller for causing Chicago to have a huge increase in guns.

I'm all for cracking down gun violence, but I am NOT for it at the expense of loss of our rights.

 

[calsdad]

This is the part that makes me laugh:

The Crime Lab will work closely with one or more winning applicants to raise private funding to implement programs that can be rigorously evaluated by University scholars.

Sure - that will ensure success.

 

[Bruce for NH State Rep]

Today the Crime Lab is launching a design competition for the Chicago Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence Among School Age Youth.

Hmmmm....I got it!

A total ban on the possession of handguns within city limits!

That should do it.

 

[dreamer]

I know this is naively optimistic, but what about using this "gun lab" idea to assess the impact of increased LEGAL carry of handguns and fair legal treatment of defense with said weapons? Without the input of informed gun owners, such a trial could be poorly designed and through design reasons "demonstrate" a negative impact from legal gun ownership.

 

[doobie]

I know this is naively optimistic, but what about using this "gun lab" idea to assess the impact of increased LEGAL carry of handguns and fair legal treatment of defense with said weapons? Without the input of informed gun owners, such a trial could be poorly designed and through design reasons "demonstrate" a negative impact from legal gun ownership.

Shush, they are government, they cannot say or do anything that makes sense.

 

[bfm]

Have to wait and see what they actually do, but everything mentioned in the article sounded good. Deal with the problems youths hit like failing schools/alcohol/drugs. And work on stopping the illegal trade of guns. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything at all about preventing lawful ownership.

 

[hminsky]

The big lesson from "The Tipping Point", about the big drop of murder and violent crime in New York, was that a small portion of the population is responsible for almost all the violent crime. How about they pass a law which executes repeat violent felons. I think that would have a dramatic effect on gun violence, and if the aim is to save $$ (which is a stupid stupid argument, when it comes to civil rights), then quick execution, with limited time for appeal, would save the most money.

 

[bfm]

And to my previous post, yes I do know that the funders are antigun, but am still interested to see if any worth while ideas come out of this.

 

[JoeyB]

Damn, and to think I actually liked him when he played baseball with Foghorn Leghorn...

Hahaha +1. I was going to ask, do you think this guy has ever fired a gun in his life?

 

[wahsben]

A grant from the joyce foundation. That tells me right there that the study is flawed.

 

[terraformer]

I'm with BFM on this one. Nothing in that article sounded barking and moonbattish. It was all wonky policy guy, but he/they made a point to single out causes of violence, not one of which had to do with the availability of guns to non-prohibited persons. In fact, the exact opposite. They singled out the illicit/illegal market specifically and did not use the tired trope we are used to hearing about. The basic premise of their pitch is that a lot of anti-violence programs out there don't work. Where have I heard that before??? If I knew more about it, and was actually assured they would be fair and objective, I would actually think about donating money to this.

PS: There is something else one needs to remember about the university of chicago. Their economics department makes CNBC look like a bunch of communists. They are hardcore lessae faire capitalists. The rest of the school is actually somewhat middle of the road and it is not a government school, but private.

 

[drgrant]

I'm with BFM on this one. Nothing in that article sounded barking and moonbattish.

Sorry, but "Gun Violence" by itself is generally a moonbat origin term. Usually when it comes up, only moonbat ideas follow it. The smell on
that term is usually from people with the same old "blame the gun" syndrome.

-Mike

 

[terraformer]

Sorry, but "Gun Violence" by itself is generally a moonbat origin term. Usually when it comes up, only moonbat ideas follow it. The smell on
that term is usually from people with the same old "blame the gun" syndrome.

-Mike

Maybe, but there is a lot of violence in urban areas and the type of violence that gets attention is the gun violence, not the other types. If you read the site, you see they don't differentiate as much as the article did. And if you think about the kind of violence that causes us problems, it is the projectile from a distance kind.

 

[gene]

What the hell happened to his head?

 

[Spanz]

Shame it is way out there in chicago. A couple of us could get together, form a company, and submit a proposal to them for funding. Say $10 million for a pilot program to teach teenagers in chicago safe and proper gun handling and usage techniques. 10 of us training for a year, $10 million funding, probably cost $2 million to set up, leave $8 million/ 10 = $800K salary for each of us.

 

[economist]

Let's be clear: There is no way in hell that these guys can measure something as amorphous as "social cost" resulting from "gun violence". As a simple example, any such measure should be net of "social benefits" from "gun violence" (this is no doubt equated with gun ownership for the purposes of social policy).

Forget everything else these morons say. Here is the sum total of explanation for their $2.5 billion number (contained in footnote 3 of the report):

In 2008, there were 412 gun homicides in the City of Chicago. Figures for the numbers of gun homicides for the years 1999 through 2007 come from the Chicago Police Department’s “2006–2007 Murder Analysis in Chicago”. If we look at the past five years rather than the past 10 years, Chicago averages 360 gun homicides per year. Analyses by Crime Lab team member Philip Cook of Duke University indicate that the likelihood that an assault-related gunshot wound results in the death of the victim is about one in six, so that for each gun homicide we observe in a city, on average we expect there to be an additional five nonfatal firearm assaults (Cook, 1985). Our estimate for the social costs per crime-related gunshot wound comes from contingent valuation survey estimates for what the American public would be willing to pay to reduce the number of such shootings by 30 percent, taken from Cook and Ludwig (2000). One limitation for present purposes is that these are national figures, and in principle the public’s willingness to pay to reduce gun violence might be different in Chicago compared to the United States as a whole. Another important caveat is that the public’s willingness to pay to avert gun violence may not be proportional to the change in the number of shootings (so that, for example, the value of eliminating gun violence altogether need not be 3.33 times the value of reducing gun violence by 30 percent). With these qualifications in mind, our estimates suggest that over the previous 10 years Chicago would average about 420 x 6 = 2,500 crime-related shootings per year, so that the total social cost of gun violence to the city would be on the order of 2,500 x $1 million = $2.5 billion.

Got that? $1 million is the cost of a "shooting", they "estimate" 6 shootings per homicide, and then multiply by the average number of homicides in the past 10 years. They could have just said that they estimate "social cost" as $6 million per homicide, but that would have been more honest, self-evidently stupid, and less catchy as a headline. Note that clear effort to inflate the measure by ignoring reduction in gun related homicides in the more recent 5-year period. Now that's scholarship.

To keep myself from writing a 2000 word essay on the amount of bullshit masquerading as academic research, I will simply say that this "study" is no more or less accurate (well, likely less) than measures of "social cost" for cancer, the flu, a 65 MPH speed limit, or "casual Fridays". These studies are aimed squarely at a single target: publicity for the purposes of obtaining notoriety, tenure, and research funding. For these purposes, the more outlandish the claim, the better.

 

[Rob Boudrie]

$2,500 for every household in the city

I'd wage 10:1 they don't add to the postive side of the leger -

- The cost of future crimes not committeed by the shootee because he is dead

- The cost of a public defender, trial and incarceration of a shootee who is from the criminal class

- The cost of public assistance and life medical care that does not need to be paid because the shootee is dead.

These are all very relevant if the percentage of shootees who are of the criminal class, on public assistance, or both is of greater portion than average for society (which I suspect it is).

 

[Jose]

Proof that abortion might actually be a good thing?

 

[MaverickNH]

Let's be clear: There is no way in hell that these guys can measure something as amorphous as "social cost" resulting from "gun violence".

The oft-repeated criticism of this work is the fuzzy cost: "Our estimate for the social costs per crime-related gunshot wound comes from contingent valuation survey estimates for what the American public would be willing to pay to reduce the number of such shootings by 30 percent, taken from Cook and Ludwig (2000)."

A survey of what you might pay does not equate to the cost. What small fraction of people put their money where their mouth is? As many times as I've said "I'd give my left nut for ..." - I've still gottem both.

 

[terraformer]

The oft-repeated criticism of this work is the fuzzy cost: "Our estimate for the social costs per crime-related gunshot wound comes from contingent valuation survey estimates for what the American public would be willing to pay to reduce the number of such shootings by 30 percent, taken from Cook and Ludwig (2000)."

A survey of what you might pay does not equate to the cost. What small fraction of people put their money where their mouth is? As many times as I've said "I'd give my left nut for ..." - I've still gottem both.

But more seriously. This is a common critique of Economics in general. They are never able to accurately predict value without large volumes of transactional data. Everything else is just fuzzy guesstimation. Look past that BS, there may still be something here of value.

 

[JOHNNY P]

What's so funny about this is that criminals don't obtain guns legally. There were no convicted felons in my pistol cert class. All this will do is make it difficult for abiding citizens to obtain a weapon. This will do nothing to halt gun violence. The more I read about Chicago, the more I am realizing that's it's nothing more than an overflowing cesspool.

 

[Jose]

The more I read about Chicago, the more I am realizing that's it's nothing more than an overflowing cesspool.

It overflowed right into DC.

 

[Carguy]

Compare Pre-restrictive gunlaws stats (no matter how skewed the calculations may be) to the current stats (using the same skewed formulas) and see which timeline has "less" of cost.

I will bet a dollar to a donut that it will be the "Pre-restrictive " time.

And why are they comparing all the homicides/shootings statistics with a project that wants to reduce teenage gun violence (whatever that is...I've never met a violent gun in my lifetime)?

Publicity for their cause and nothing more. I just wish we had more people / organizations studying and talking up statistics / costs of the lack of effectivness of the current gunlaws and why more restrictive ones won't make things better!