Criminal Justice Research Examines Intersection of Gun Laws, Theft & Violence
With the Crime Analysis master’s degree concentration offered by the BU Metropolitan College Criminal Justice program, students develop the expertise needed to analyze data from a variety of sources and use the findings to inform policies, strategic approaches, and enforcement and investigation practices.
It’s a field that Assistant Professor Shea Cronin knows well. The chair of Applied Social Sciences at BU MET has an expertise in criminal justice data and analysis, as he teaches students in his course, Applied Analytical Methods (MET CJ 591), an MS in Criminal Justice required course.
On March 15, Dr. Cronin was invited to join BU’s Research on Tap lecture series on “Safety, Justice, and Health in US Cities” as part of its cross-University efforts, co-sponsored by the Initiative on Cities, to investigate links and explore social solutions through community-based and policy-engaged work.
At BU’s Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering, Dr. Cronin interrogated the correlation between state firearm laws, gun theft, and consequential violence, presenting findings from the research he has led alongside graduate students Bridget Bishop and Matt Fasullo.
As he explained, states largely seek to regulate gun violence through laws pertaining to the purchase, sale, and possession of firearms. One problem, however, is that firearm theft undermines these efforts in ways both direct and indirect. The extent and impact of this variety of larceny an under-examined element of the patterns of gun violence, which is why Professor Cronin has put it under the microscope.
“Theft is one of the critical pathways that can undermine the effectiveness of regulations, in both direct and indirect ways,” Cronin said.
Dr. Cronin and his team studied state and city trends over time, the associated regulations, and the ways those regulations impacted or reflected outcomes. Utilizing data gathered over 12 years and 19 stated by the National Incident-Based Reporting Systems (NIBRS), which captures what kinds of properties are reported stolen, they found that more than 600,000 guns were stolen between 2008 and 2019.
The data indicates that states with more guns in them see more firearm theft—particularly states with “shall issue,” right-to-carry laws, which have a 30% greater rate of theft. It also found that thefts occur most often where firearms are most often used in public areas of dispute—with 30% of firearm theft happening in places like roadways and parking lots.
The criminal justice professor emphasized the social implications of the findings.
“It’s critical to understand the disparate impact that firearm availability has on marginalized communities,” Cronin said. “It creates a very bad, clearly harmful cycle, of firearms flowing into cities [leading to] higher rates of violence, higher rates of enforcement, that all yield higher rates of costs on communities of color, in particular.”
Watch the lecture below.