Researchers measure distance between guns, Chicago offenders

By Christen Smith

Less than three people stand between criminal offenders and guns in the city of Chicago, according to a new study published this week in the Journal of Urban Health.
Researchers at Northwestern University used arrest records and firearm recovery data collected from the Chicago Police Department between 2006 and 2013 to construct a “network” of offenders and their proximity — via associates — to firearms. The approach, considered novel within the scientific community, attempts to quantify how easily guns fall into the wrong hands.
“Literally, we wanted to know how many ‘handshakes’ away possible users of illegal firearms are to a gun,” said Andrew V. Papachristos, senior author of the study and a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, during an interview with the student-lead Northwestern Now website. “How easy is it for them to get a gun?”
Researchers focused in on a group of more than 188,000 co-offenders — defined as two people arrested together and therefore, likely to be associates or friends in a larger network of criminals. The study relayed the offender list with information on nearly 29,000 firearms seized from Chicago streets to map out the distance between the two data sets. Papachristos described the result as about “2.5 handshakes”

Source: Guns.com