This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (5)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related letter  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Lawrence W. Sherman, PhD

JAMA. 2000;283:1193-1195.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Societies with high gun densities have limited options for reducing gun homicide rates. One option is to ban gun ownership and confiscate or buy back all guns from the population. While this is politically unlikely in the United States, it has recently been done for certain kinds of weapons in Australia¹ and England.² No formal evaluations of the effects of these measures on gun violence are available, and the generalizability of any results would be limited by the low gun densities in those countries relative to countries with high gun densities and high homicide rates, like the United States.

Another option is to restrict new sales of guns so that only persons deemed less at risk of misuse of the weapons could purchase them. This is what the United States did in enacting the Brady Bill in 1993. While this law has blocked hundreds of thousands . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Department of Sociology and Fels Center of Government, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED LETTER

Gun Carrying and Homicide Prevention
Lawrence W. Sherman
JAMA. 2000;283(9):1193-1195.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED ARTICLE

Effect of a Ban on Carrying Firearms on Homicide Rates in 2 Colombian Cities
Andrés Villaveces, Peter Cummings, Victoria E. Espitia, Thomas D. Koepsell, Barbara McKnight, and Arthur L. Kellermann
JAMA. 2000;283(9):1205-1209.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Complementary Strategies to Prevent Firearm Injury
Cole
JAMA 2001;285:1071-1072.
FULL TEXT  

Reducing Gun Violence:: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising
SHERMAN
Criminal Justice 2001;1:11-25.
ABSTRACT  

Would Prevention of Gun Carrying Reduce US Homicide Rates?
Marvel et al.
JAMA 2000;284:1788-1789.
FULL TEXT