The FBI defines murder as "the willful killing of one human being by another." However, the FBI points out that a murder included in the crime count might later be changed to a charge of justifiable homicide, self-defense, suicide, or accident. A person who is arrested and charged with murder (whose alleged crime is included in the crime count) may be innocent and later released. The…
Killings of law enforcement officers have declined dramatically since the 1970s, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) (Homicide Trends in the United States, January 10, 2003). The decline is credited TABLE 5.3 TABLE 5.4 to the widespread availability since 1975 of lightweight body armor. The development of this armor was spurred by the dramatic rise in office…
The FBI defines robbery as "the taking or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control TABLE 5.6 of a person or persons by force or threat of force or violence and/or by putting the victim in fear." As in the case of murder, armed robberies are recorded from police investigations and do not involve actual convictions following a trial. The data do…
The FBI defines aggravated assault as: an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. This type of assault is usually accompanied by the use of a weapon or by means likely to produce death or great bodily harm. Attempts are included since it is not necessary that an injury result when a gun, knife, or other weapon is TABLE 5.7 u…
The FBI has also compiled data on the category of justifiable homicide, which they define as "the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty or the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen." Table 5.10 shows the data for justifiable homicides committed by private citizens during 2002, which shows a gradual upward trend. In 2…
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports collect data only on crimes reported to law enforcement agencies. To give a better picture of actual crime occurrence in the United States—including unreported crime—the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) conducts the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). It has been underway since 1973. The statistics appear in the annual report Criminal Vi…
David Hemenway, deputy director of the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Center, asserted that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense (David Hemenway TABLE 5.11 and Deborah R. Azrael, "The Relative Frequency of Offensive and Defensive Gun Use: Results of a National Survey," Violence and Victims, vol. 1…
How do criminals acquire guns? A 1997 U.S. Department of Justice survey of prison inmates possessing a firearm during the offense that put them in jail (Caroline Wolf Harlow, Firearm Use by Offenders, Bureau of Justice Statistics, November 2001) showed that 14% bought their gun from a retail store, pawn shop, flea market, or gun show, down from 21% in 1991, when the last such survey was conducted.…
Police officers seldom fire their weapons, rarely wound or kill their intended targets when they do fire, and sometimes shoot themselves or other officers unintentionally. Still, firearms are a valuable weapon to aid law enforcement officers. Justifiable homicide means a felon is killed in an attempt to prevent the death of the officer or to prevent serious bodily injury to another person. Table 5…
Weapons offenses are violations of statutes or regulations controlling deadly weapons, which include firearms and their ammunition, silencers, explosives, and certain knives. All fifty states, many cities and towns, and the federal government have laws concerning deadly weapons, including restrictions on their possession, carrying, use, sales, manufacturing, importing, and exporting. Table 5.14 sh…
Many of the data presented in this chapter demonstrate that the criminal misuse of guns by young people is a serious problem. A major federal effort to deal with the problem was launched in 1996 by the National Tracing Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Called the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative (YCGII), the program traces firearms to their original po…
Some states have enacted strict gun control laws to keep prohibited buyers, such as felons and children, from purchasing firearms. However, gunrunners make firearms easily available by legally buying guns in states with relaxed purchasing regulations and transporting them to states with tougher gun laws. Although by law only state residents can buy guns, gunrunners get around this by obtaining fal…
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