Closer to Guns: the Role of Street Gangs in Facilitating Access to Illegal Firearms.

Criminal offenders often turn to social networks to gain access to firearms, yet we know little about how networks facilitate access to firearms. This study conducts a network analysis of a co-offending network for the City of Chicago to determine how close any offender may be to a firearm. We use arrest data to recreate the co-offending network of all individuals who were arrested with at least one other person over an eight-year period.

Tragic, but not random: the social contagion of nonfatal gunshot injuries.

This study investigates the concentration of nonfatal gunshot injuries within risky social networks. Using six years of data on gunshot victimization and arrests in Chicago, we reconstruct patterns of co-offending for the city and locate gunshot victims within these networks. Results indicate that 70 percent of all nonfatal gunshot victims during the observation period can be located in co-offending networks comprised of less than 6 percent of the city's population.