A groundbreaking new analysis from researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering has revealed that New York City is among the top 15% safest cities out of over 800 in the United States. This suggests that the city’s efforts to reduce homicides have been effective.
The study found that population size did not directly correlate with higher rates of gun homicides, ownership, or gun sellers in a predictable straight-line way across cities. The relationships were more complex than that.
To address this, the researchers used a data analytics measure called Scale-Adjusted Metropolitan Indicators (SAMIs) to filter out population effects and allow for a fair comparison between cities of different sizes. This supported principled analyses of the interplay between firearm violence, ownership, and accessibility.
Maurizio Porfiri, the paper’s senior author, emphasized that per capita rates of gun violence do not necessarily reflect the effectiveness of gun laws in a city. He explained that SAMI showed that some large cities with higher per capita rates of gun violence might actually be doing a better job of curtailing gun harms than their smaller counterparts with lower per capita rates.
2024-02-29 18:00:04
Article from phys.org