Search Results (30)

Purpose: Following George Floyd’s death, the push for law enforcement accountability policies has intensified. Despite robust legislative action, challenges in enacting and implementing meaningful reforms persist. This study analyzes police accountability policies (PAP) in the U.S. from 2020 to 2022, identifying barriers and facilitators through expert perspectives in enforcement oversight, policy advocacy, and community engagement. Methods: The study used a dual approach: analyzing 226 police accountability bills from all 50 U.S. states, D.C., and Puerto Rico via the National Conference of State Legislatures database, and categorizing them into six key areas such as training, technology use, and certification. Additionally, a survey was conducted among experts to identify the challenges and drivers in passing police accountability legislation. Findings: A legislative analysis showed that although 48 states passed police accountability laws, California, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Colorado have made significant strides by passing multiple pieces of legislation aimed at enhancing law enforcement accountability and ensuring better policing practices. The most common policies focused on training and technology, enacted by 16 and 12 states, respectively. However, crucial certification and decertification policies were adopted in just 13 states, highlighting the inconsistent implementation of measures critical for police accountability and transparency. The survey identified several barriers to passing PAP, including inadequate support from local governments (72.7%). Structural exclusion of poor and minority communities from policing resources was also a significant barrier (54.5%). Facilitators included community support (81.8%) and a cultural shift in policing towards viewing officers as “guardians” rather than “warriors” (63.6%). Conclusions: While some progress has been made in passing PAP, considerable gaps remain, particularly in enforcement and comprehensive reform. Resistance from law enforcement institutions, lack of community support, and structural inequalities continue to impede the adoption of effective PAP. Full article

This paper examines Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island through a Hindu eco-spiritual framework to explore how ancient cosmological concepts illuminate contemporary environmental crises. Building upon the legend of Bonduki Sadagar and Manasa Devi, Ghosh narrates the rupture of sacred human–nature relationships in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. This study employs a tripartite conceptual lens of karma, dharma, and ecosystem drawn from Hindu philosophy to analyze how the novel frames environmental degradation, human moral failure, and ecological interconnectedness. Karma, as the law of cause and effect, is used to depict the consequences of human exploitation through natural disasters, climate migration, and the collapse of ecosystems. Dharma emerges as a principle advocating ecological responsibility and symbiosis between humans and nonhuman life. This paper argues that Ghosh tactfully intertwines Hindu metaphysics with contemporary ecological science to critique capitalist modernity’s environmental violence. The novel’s depiction of floods, the sinking of Venice, and the global refugee crisis dramatizes karmic consequences, while its evocation of myth–science convergence offers a vision of sacred interdependence. Ultimately, this paper concludes that Gun Island provides an urgent eco-spiritual model for reimagining planetary ethics and responding to the Anthropocene through humility, relationality, and spiritual responsibility. Full article

Background/Objectives: Conduct Disorder (CD) involves persistent behavior violating societal norms and others’ rights. A subgroup of adolescents with CD exhibits callous–unemotional (CU) traits, which are linked to severe antisocial behavior and poorer long-term outcomes. Research suggests parenting plays an important role in the development of CU traits. However, few studies have explored the role of maternal and paternal parenting practices mediating the link between CU traits and violence within the same study. Methods: This study included 222 adolescents with Conduct Disorder (M_age = 15.7, 68% male) and examined whether perceived parental warmth and hostility, measured using the Quality of Parental Relationships, mediated the association between callous–unemotional (CU) traits and youth involvement in violent crime and gun violence, assessed via the Violent Crime Assessment and Gun Violence Questionnaire. Results: Double mediation models showed that only maternal hostility mediated the link between CU traits and violence, while maternal warmth and paternal parenting practices did not. Conclusions: Findings emphasize the role of maternal hostility in exacerbating violence, including gun violence, among adolescents with CD and CU traits. Full article

Background: Gun-related homicide remains a persistent public health crisis in the United States, with over 48,000 firearm-related deaths reported in 2022, including 19,651 homicides and 27,032 suicides. Despite frequent calls for tighter gun control, firearm access alone does not explain the complexity of violence. Objective: This commentary aims to unpack the socioeconomic, psychological, and biological drivers of gun-related homicide and propose integrative, evidence-based solutions that extend beyond legislative reform. Methods: We synthesized data from peer-reviewed literature, national crime and health databases (e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Federal Bureau of Investigation), and international reports. We examined patterns related to poverty, trauma, male aggression, neurobiology, and firearm acquisition, as well as cross-national comparisons with countries like Switzerland and Mexico. Findings: Young males, particularly those aged 10–29, accounted for 50% of homicide offenders in 2022. African Americans experienced homicide rates of 23.1 per 100,000, ten times the rate among Whites. Up to 56% of incarcerated men report childhood physical trauma, and over 40% of those in prison exhibit symptoms of serious mental illness. While firearm legislation varies widely, analysis reveals that over 90% of crime guns are acquired illegally or through informal sources. International comparisons show that poverty and weak rule of law, more than gun laws alone, correlate with elevated homicide rates. Conclusions: Reducing gun violence sustainably requires a multifaceted approach. Authors advocate for investments in trauma-informed mental health care, focused deterrence programs, early childhood interventions, and improved enforcement against illegal gun trafficking. A public health strategy that integrates social reform with targeted regulation holds the greatest promise for long-term change. Full article

Public mass shootings pose a critical safety challenge in the U.S. This study investigates how media framing relates to public online engagement, focusing on gun regulation, mental health, and individual and political accountability across five major TV networks: ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and NBC. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research analyzes 678 news reports and 7605 audience comments. Findings reveal significant differences in audience engagement based on framing, and in key variables show audiences taking opposite positions to their news network’s narratives. ABC, CNN, and NBC’s thematic framing, highlighting systemic failures, elicits more balanced responses, whereas Fox News and MSNBC’s episodic framing, emphasizing individual or political accountability, correlates with polarized reactions. This research extends media framing theories by showing how episodic framing reduces support for systemic reforms, emphasizing personal responsibility. The study offers crucial insights for scholars, policymakers, and journalists on media’s role in shaping public discourse on gun violence. Full article

Although the U.S. makes up only 5% of the global population, it accounts for approximately 31% of public mass shootings. Gun violence and mass shootings not only result in loss of life and injury but also inflict lasting psychological trauma, cause property damage, and lead to significant economic losses. We recently developed and published an embedded system prototype for detecting gunshots in an indoor environment. The proposed device can be attached to the walls or ceilings of schools, offices, clubs, places of worship, etc., similar to smoke detectors or night lights, and they can notify the first responders as soon as a gunshot is fired. The proposed system will help to stop the shooter early and the injured people can be taken to the hospital quickly, thus more lives can be saved. In this project, a new custom dataset of blank gunshot sounds is recorded, and a deep learning model using both time and frequency domain features is trained to classify gunshot and non-gunshot sounds with 99% accuracy. The previously developed system suffered from several security and privacy vulnerabilities. In this research, those vulnerabilities are addressed by implementing secure Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) communication protocols for IoT systems, better authentication methods, Wi-Fi provisioning without Bluetooth, and over-the-air (OTA) firmware update features. The prototype is implemented in a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W embedded system platform and successfully tested with blank gunshots and possible false alarms. Full article

Gun violence is a global problem that affects communities and individuals, posing challenges to safety and well-being. The use of autonomous weapons detection systems could significantly improve security worldwide. Despite notable progress in the field of weapons detection closed-circuit television-based systems, several challenges persist, including real-time detection, improved accuracy in detecting small objects, and reducing false positives. This paper, based on our extensive experience in this field and successful private company contracts, presents a detection scheme comprising two modules that enhance the performance of a renowned detector. These modules not only augment the detector’s performance but also have a low negative impact on the inference time. Additionally, a scale-matching technique is utilised to enhance the detection of weapons with a small aspect ratio. The experimental results demonstrate that the scale-matching method enhances the detection of small objects, with an improvement of +13.23 in average precision compared to the non-use of this method. Furthermore, the proposed detection scheme effectively reduces the number of false positives (a 71% reduction in the total number of false positives) of the baseline model, while maintaining a low inference time (34 frames per second on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX-3060 card with a resolution of 720 pixels) in comparison to the baseline model (47 frames per second). Full article

The current review explores multiple definitions of school shootings used by myriad data collection platforms and by various scholars. Importantly, the impacts of definitional discrepancies on inclusion criteria, data divergence, research, policy, and public perception are discussed at length. The review concludes with a call to Criminologists and school gun violence scholars to better collaborate on what should be considered a “school shooting” and lists five benefits that may result from modifying school gun violence definitions and data collection methodologies. Full article

Gun and street group violence remains a serious problem in cities across the United States and the focused deterrence strategy has been a widely applied law enforcement intervention to reduce it. Although two meta-analytical studies concluded that the intervention had a significant effect on violence, questions remain about how violence changes across space and time during and after the intervention. This study applies novel geospatial analyses to assess spatiotemporal changes in gun violence before, during, and after the implementation of Philadelphia Focused Deterrence. Emerging hot spot analysis employing Space-Time cubes of ten annual time bins (2009–2018) at the Thiessen polygon level was used to detect and categorize patterns. The analyses revealed a non-significant decreasing trend across the ten-year period. Furthermore, there were ninety-three statistically significant hot spots categorized into four hot spot patterns: fourteen new hot spots; twenty-three consecutive; one persistent; and fifty-three sporadic. There was no evidence showing statistically significant hot spots for the “diminishing” pattern. Knowledge of these patterns that emerge across micro-locations can be used by law enforcement practitioners to complement data-driven problem solving and fine tune these strategies and other place-based programming. Policymakers can use findings to prioritize resources when developing complementary prevention and intervention efforts by tailoring those efforts to the different emergent patterns. Full article

Over the years, the field of forensic anthropology has become more diverse, bringing unique perspectives to a previously homogeneous field. This diversification has been accompanied by recognizing the need for advocacy and activism in an effort to support the communities we serve: marginalized communities that are often overrepresented in the forensic population. As such, forensic anthropologists see the downstream effects of colonialism, white supremacy, inequitable policies, racism, poverty, homophobia, transphobia, gun violence, and misogyny. Some argue that advocacy and activism have no place in forensic anthropological praxis. The counterarguments for engaging in advocacy and activism uphold white, heterosexual, cisgender, and ableist privilege by arguing that perceived objectivity and unbiased perspectives are more important than personally biasing experiences and positionality that supposedly jeopardize the science and expert testimony. Advocacy and activism, however, are not new to the practice of anthropology. Whether through sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, or other areas of biological anthropology, activism and advocacy play an important role, using both the scientific method and community engagement. Using a North American approach, we detail the scope of the issues, address how advocacy and activism are perceived in the wider discipline of anthropology, and define ways in which advocacy and activism can be utilized more broadly in the areas of casework, research, and education. Full article

Gun violence and mass shootings kill and injure people, create psychological trauma, damage properties, and cause economic loss. The loss from gun violence can be reduced if we can detect the gunshot early and notify the police as soon as possible. In this project, a novel gunshot detector device is developed that automatically detects indoor gunshot sound and sends the gunshot location to the nearby police station in real time using the Internet. The users of the device and the emergency responders also receive smartphone notifications whenever the shooting happens. This will help the emergency responders to quickly arrive at the crime scene, thus the shooter can be caught, injured people can be taken to the hospital quickly, and lives can be saved. The gunshot detector is an electronic device that can be placed in schools, shopping malls, offices, etc. The device also records the gunshot sounds for post-crime scene analysis. A deep learning model, based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), is trained to classify the gunshot sound from other sounds with 98% accuracy. A prototype of the gunshot detector device, the central server for the emergency responder’s station, and smartphone apps have been developed and tested successfully. Full article

Abdominal injuries in children caused by guns are a rare clinical entity globally. But, in countries with undefined legal regulations and in war zones, urban violence is a tremendous social problem among older children and adolescents. This manuscript provides details regarding two cases of severe gunshot injuries in young children. The injuries were very complicated and included damage to the parenchymatous and hollow organs and major blood vessels. The clinical presentation on admission was severe and dramatic, but the patients survived. However, one patient developed numerous complications that required repeated surgical interventions and long treatment. This article provides a detailed description of injuries and how to treat them. Patient care requires a multidisciplinary approach, and the initial decision on further treatment depends on the patient’s hemodynamic stability. Full article

Introduction. Environmental Health in a Global World at New York University was re-designed as a class participatory effort, challenging undergraduate students to understand environmental hazards and the resultant adverse health outcomes by embracing the inherent complexity of environmental risks and proposing solutions. Methods. Following introductory lectures, students are placed into teams and assigned a specific perspective, or avatar, which includes learning to see the challenge from the perspective of a technical expert such as a biologist, an engineer, or an anthropologist. The teams then design specific systems maps to visualize the complex interactions that lead to adverse health outcomes after a given environmental exposure. The maps highlight potential leverage points where relatively minor interventions can provide a disproportionate benefit in health outcomes. The teams then explore potential interventions and identify the potential unintended consequences of those actions, develop and advocate for innovative new strategies to mitigate risk and improve outcomes. Results and Discussion. Over the past 5 years, we have taught this methodology to over 680 students with strong, student-oriented results. The teams created and presented more than 100 strategies, addressing a diverse set of environmental challenges that include water contamination, gun violence, air pollution, environmental justice, health security, and climate change. Developing the strategies helped the students understand environmental threats in a more holistic way, provided them with some agency in finding solutions, and offered an opportunity for them to improve their presentation skills. The responses in course evaluations have been enthusiastic, with many students reporting a deep impact on their college experience. Full article

This paper discusses the implications of Sarah Josepha Hale’s polarizing opposition to the franchise of women on her legacy award, given to many authors since its inception, but most notably to contemporary women writers whom Hale likely would have rejected. In 2019, the award went to Jodi Picoult, an author who bridges journalistic writing on topics such as abortion, white supremacy, and gun violence, among others, with fiction novel writing. Hale’s own works are archived through the Richards Free Library, and as such, the award is given for the entire collective body of work of one nominated literary person. The award impacts not only Picoult’s career but Hale’s legacy as an open opposer to the franchise of women, as well as the opportunities for contemporary women writers. Full article

This article explores the motivations behind adherents to Christian nationalism using several inter-related psychoanalytic theoretical lenses. Following a description of Christian nationalist beliefs, four conscious motivations for joining will be outlined first, including recruitment tactics/evangelization that fulfill the need for belonging and a sense of sacred purpose, the fear of loss of white social status, fear of loss of patriarchal authority and hierarchy, and the allure of conspiracy theories such as QAnon for conservative Christians. This will be followed by a more in-depth discussion of unconscious dynamics that can fuel individuals’ adoption of a Christian-nationalist belief system, including group dynamics and Freud’s insights into the power of a charismatic leader, the allure of guns reflecting deeper unconscious fears of emasculation, paranoid splitting and the role of trauma, and, finally, the ways in which this segment of American Christianity may be unconsciously carrying disavowed and split-off aggression towards other Christians—and how better integration might be achieved through nonviolent resistance to injustice, and positive political engagement. Full article