By 1990 there were approximately 200 million guns in private hands in the United States, and around half of American households contained a gun. Over 30,000 people a year are killed with guns in suicides, homicides, and accidents, and Americans use guns for defensive purposes as many as a million times a year. There is little doubt that gun violence and control are issues of vital importance, and they continue to inspire national debate. It is doubtful, however, that most gun debates are w...

For decades, scholars have disagreed about what kinds of behavior count as crime. Is it simply a violation of the criminal law? Is it behavior that causes serious harm? Is the seriousness affected by how many people are harmed and does it make a difference who those people are? Are crimes less criminal if the victims are black, lower class, or foreigners? When corporations victimize workers is that a crime? What about when governments violate basic human rights of their citizens, and who t...

This book summarizes and synthesizes a vast body of research on the effects of legal punishment and criminal behavior. Covering studies conducted between 1967 and 2015, Punishment and Crime evaluates the assertion that legal punishment reduces crime by investigating the impacts, both positive and negative, of legal punishment on criminal behavior, with emphasis on the effects of punitive crime control policies via the mechanisms of deterrence and incapacitation.Brion Sever...

This new paperback comprehensively reviews the research evidence on the links between guns, violence, and gun control, and reports results of the author's own research as well. In Targeting Guns, Kleck follows the line of argument and careful statistical inference of his earlier prizewinning volume, Point Blank, while updating the literature reviews and statistical information, and adding two chapters.