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41 J. Res. Crime & Delinquency 3 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/jrcd41 and id is 1 raw text is: MEASURES OF GUN OWNERSHIP LEVELS FOR MACRO-LEVEL CRIME AND VIOLENCE RESEARCH GARY KLECK Valid measures of macro-level gun levels are essential to assessing the impact of gun levels on crime and violence rates, yet almost all prior research on this topic uses proxies that are either invalid or whose validity has been assumed rather than demon- strated. The present study uses city, state, cross-national, and time series data to assess the criterion validity of over two dozen gun indicators. The criterion measures used are primarily direct survey measures of household gun prevalence. The results indicate that (1) most measures used in past research have poor validity, making past findings uninterpretable, (2) the best measure for cross-sectional research is the per- centage of suicides committed with guns, and (3) there are no known measures that are valid indicators of trends in gun levels, making credible longitudinal research on the subject impossible at present. Keywords: guns; violence; measurement Macro-level research on the possible links between guns and violence is essential because there is no other way to estimate the net effects of societal or community gun levels on crime or violence rates. Studies that attempt to link the gun ownership of individuals to their experiences as victims (e.g. Kellermann et al. 1993) do not effectively determine how an individual's risk of victimization is affected by gun ownership of other people, especially those not living in the gun owner's own household. Likewise, studies of crime incidents (e.g., Kleck and Delone 1993) can address the effects of ac- tual offensive gun use by offenders and defensive gun use by victims on the outcome of the incident (e.g., injury to the victim), but cannot assess whether gun ownership among potential victims deters criminals from attempting crimes in the first place, or whether gun ownership encourages offenders to seek hostile contact with victims in the first place. If gun ownership by pro- spective victims has deterrent or other violence-reducing effects, this effect A previous version of this article was presented at the annual meetings of the American Soci- ety of Criminology in Atlanta, Georgia, November 7-10, 2001. JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN CRIME AND DELINQUENCY, Vol. 41 No. 1, February 2004 3-36 DOI: 10.1177/0022427803256229 0 2004 Sage Publications 3

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