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SOCIAL SCIENCE
A mathematical model of gun ownership has been developed that clarifies the debate on gun control and tentatively suggests that firearms restrictions may reduce the homicide rate.
The mass killing of 20 children and 6 adults on 14 December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (Fig. 1), has revived an enduring controversy about gun control in the United States. Gun-control advocates believe that widespread gun ownership increases the rate of gun-related crime and homicide, whereas critics argue that gun availability actually decreases gun violence because potential assailants are less likely to commit such crimes if they believe citizens are armed. But who is right? In an article published in PLoS ONE, Wodarz and Komarova1 describe an elegant and highly parsimonious mathematical model designed to answer exactly this question. And, in an extremely cautious way, they suggest that more guns make things worse.
The scientific literature suggests that gun homicides are influenced by various interwoven factors, including the rate of legal and illegal gun possession, the national prevalence of armed and unarmed attacks, the likelihood of fatalities in such attacks, and the quality and quantity of general law enforcement2-5. Gun-control policy is clearly only one key variable in a complex social system. But work on the issue is typically conducted by scholars who collect data on types of gun-control policy and numbers of gun homicides, and look for correlations while controlling for certain important variables - such as whether the locations of the homicides are rural or urban, or whether it...