Deer Hunting Season and Firearm Violence in US Rural Counties.

Importance: Firearm violence is a major public health problem in the US. However, relatively little research has focused particular attention on firearm violence in rural areas, and few studies have used research designs that draw on exogenous variation in the prevalence of firearms to estimate the association between firearm presence and shootings.

Objective: To investigate the association between the start of deer hunting season and shootings in rural counties in the US.

The Era of Progress on Gun Mortality: State Gun Regulations and Gun Deaths from 1991 to 2016.

Background: The recent rise of gun violence may lead to the perception that the problem of gun mortality in the United States is intractable. This article provides evidence to counter this perception by bringing attention to the period spanning from 1991 to 2016 when most US states implemented more restrictive gun laws. Over this period, the United States experienced a decline in household gun ownership, and gun-related deaths fell sharply.

When and where does violence beget violence?

Gun violence is frequently described in the language of epidemics. Yet, few quantitative studies have generated convincing evidence on the most basic question underlying the epidemic model of violence: Does violence at time t beget violence at time t + 1? With a sample of 98 of the 100 largest U.S.

Immune tolerance therapies for autoimmune diseases: Shifting the goalpost to cure.

Autoimmune rheumatic diseases are characterised by an autoimmune inflammatory response to antigens of synovial tissue, muscles, and other organs. While the prognosis of these disorders has improved remarkably over recent years with the advent of biological therapeutics, prolonged drug-free remission is still rare. Advances in the understanding of the immunopathogenesis and response to immunotherapy of seropositive autoimmune rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis systemic lupus erythematosus, type 1 diabetes and the autoimmune-like celiac disease have revealed novel therapeutic opportunities.

The effect of mass shootings on daily emotions is limited by time, geographic proximity, and political affiliation.

Media coverage in the aftermath of mass shootings frequently documents expressions of sadness and outrage shared by millions of Americans. This type of collective emotion can be a powerful force in establishing shared objectives and motivating political actions. Yet, the rise in mass shootings has not translated into widespread legislative progress toward gun control across the nation.

School Climate and the Impact of Neighborhood Crime on Test Scores.

Does school climate ameliorate or exacerbate the impact of neighborhood violent crime on test scores? Using administrative data from the New York City Department of Education and the New York City Police Department, we find that exposure to violence in the residential neighborhood and an unsafe climate at school lead to substantial test score losses in English language arts (ELA). Middle school students exposed to neighborhood violent crime before the ELA exam who attend schools perceived to be less safe or to have a weak sense of community score 0.06 and 0.

The Impact of the Homicide Decline on Life Expectancy of African American Males.

Homicide is a leading cause of death for young people in the United States aged 15-34, but it has a disproportionate impact on one subset of the population: African American males. The national decline in homicide mortality that occurred from 1991 to 2014 thus provides an opportunity to generate evidence on a unique question-How do population health and health inequality change when the prevalence of one of the leading causes of death is cut in half? In this article, we estimate the impact of the decline in homicide mortality on life expectancy at birth as well as years of potential life lost for African American and white males and females, respectively. Estimates are generated using national mortality data by age, gender, race, and education level.

Violence and Vigilance: The Acute Effects of Community Violent Crime on Sleep and Cortisol.

The data combine objectively measured sleep and thrice-daily salivary cortisol collected from a 4-day diary study in a large Midwestern city with location data on all violent crimes recorded during the same time period for N = 82 children (M  = 14.90, range = 11.27-18.

Effect of neighborhood stigma on economic transactions.

The hypothesis of neighborhood stigma predicts that individuals who reside in areas known for high crime, poverty, disorder, and/or racial isolation embody the negative characteristics attributed to their communities and experience suspicion and mistrust in their interactions with strangers. This article provides an experimental test of whether neighborhood stigma affects individuals in one domain of social life: economic transactions. To evaluate the neighborhood stigma hypothesis, this study adopts an audit design in a locally organized, online classified market, using advertisements for used iPhones and randomly manipulating the neighborhood of the seller.

Children's cognitive performance and selective attention following recent community violence.

Research has shown robust relationships between community violence and psychopathology, yet relatively little is known about the ways in which community violence may affect cognitive performance and attention. The present study estimates the effects of police-reported community violence on 359 urban children's performance on a computerized neuropsychological task using a quasi-experimental fixed-effects design. Living in close proximity to a recent violent crime predicted faster but marginally less accurate task performance for the full sample, evolutionarily adaptive patterns of "vigilant" attention (i.

Geographic migration of black and white families over four generations.

This article analyzes patterns of geographic migration of black and white American families over four consecutive generations. The analysis is based on a unique set of questions in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) asking respondents about the counties and states in which their parents and grandparents were raised. Using this information along with the extensive geographic information available in the PSID survey, the article tracks the geographic locations of four generations of family members and considers the ways in which families and places are linked together over the course of a family's history.

Spatial segmentation and the black middle class.

Ethnographic studies of the black middle class focus attention on the ways in which residential environments condition the experiences of different segments of the black class structure. This study places these arguments in a larger demographic context by providing a national analysis of neighborhood inequality and spatial inequality of different racial and ethnic groups in urban America. The findings show that there has been no change over time in the degree to which majority-black neighborhoods are surrounded by spatial disadvantage.

The effect of local violence on children's attention and impulse control.

Objectives: We examined whether the burden of violence in a child's community environment alters the child's behavior and functioning in the classroom setting.

Methods: To identify the effects of local violence, we exploited variation in the timing of local homicides, based on data from the Chicago Police Department, relative to the timing of interview assessments conducted as part of a randomized controlled trial conducted with preschoolers in Head Start programs from 2004-2006, the Chicago School Readiness Project. We compared children's scores when exposed to recent local violence with scores when no recent violence had occurred to identify causal effects.

Temporary integration, resilient inequality: race and neighborhood change in the transition to adulthood.

This article focuses on neighborhood and geographic change arising with the first "selection" of an independent residential setting: the transition out of the family home. Data from two sources-the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-are used to provide complementary analyses of trajectories of change in geographic location and neighborhood racial and economic composition during young adulthood. Findings indicate that for young adults who originate in segregated urban areas and remain in such areas, the period of young adulthood is characterized by continuity in neighborhood conditions and persistent racial inequality from childhood to adulthood.

The legacy of disadvantage: multigenerational neighborhood effects on cognitive ability.

This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on "neighborhood effects" that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. To analyze multigenerational effects, the authors use newly developed methods designed to estimate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time.

DESTINATION EFFECTS: RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY AND TRAJECTORIES OF ADOLESCENT VIOLENCE IN A STRATIFIED METROPOLIS.

Two landmark policy interventions to improve the lives of youth through neighborhood mobility-the Gautreaux program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity experiments in five cities-have produced conflicting results and created a puzzle with broad implications: Do residential moves between neighborhoods increase or decrease violence, or both? To address this question we analyze data from a subsample of adolescents ages 9-12 from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of children and their families that began in Chicago, the site of the original Gautreaux program and one of the MTO experiments. We propose a dynamic modeling strategy to separate the effects of residential moving over three waves of the study from dimensions of neighborhood change and metropolitan location. The results reveal countervailing effects of mobility on trajectories of violence: Whereas neighborhood moves within Chicago lead to an elevated risk of violence, moves outside of the city reduce violent offending and exposure to violence.

The acute effect of local homicides on children's cognitive performance.

This study estimates the acute effect of exposure to a local homicide on the cognitive performance of children across a community. Data are from a sample of children age 5-17 y in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. The effect of local homicides on vocabulary and reading assessments is identified by exploiting exogenous variation in the relative timing of homicides and interview assessments among children in the same neighborhood but assessed at different times.

Neighborhood selection and the social reproduction of concentrated racial inequality.

In this paper, we consider neighborhood selection as a social process central to the reproduction of racial inequality in neighborhood attainment. We formulate a multilevel model that decomposes multiple sources of stability and change in longitudinal trajectories of achieved neighborhood income among nearly 4000 Chicago families followed for up to seven years wherever they moved in the United States. Even after we adjust for a comprehensive set of fixed and time-varying covariates, racial inequality in neighborhood attainment is replicated by movers and stayers alike.

Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability among African-American children.

Disparities in verbal ability, a major predictor of later life outcomes, have generated widespread debate, but few studies have been able to isolate neighborhood-level causes in a developmentally and ecologically appropriate way. This study presents longitudinal evidence from a large-scale study of >2,000 children ages 6-12 living in Chicago, along with their caretakers, who were followed wherever they moved in the U.S.