Such models should blend prevention strategies in an effort to overcome the tendency within many community service systems to operate in silos. The mental health community must take the lead in advocating for community-based collaborative problem-solving models to address the prevention of gun violence. Prevention of violence occurs along a continuum that begins in early childhood with programs to help parents raise emotionally healthy children and ends with efforts to identify and intervene with troubled individuals who are threatening violence. What Works: Gun Violence Prevention at the Community Level Threat assessment teams gather and analyze information to assess if a person poses a threat of violence or self-harm, and if so, take steps to intervene. Additionally, it should be noted that behavioral threat assessment is becoming a standard of care for preventing violence in schools, colleges, and the workplace and against government and other public officials. Urgent attention must be paid to the current level of access to mental health services in the United States such access is woefully insufficient. Policies and programs that identify and provide treatment for all persons suffering from a mental illness should be a national priority. What Works: Gun Violence Prediction and Prevention at the Individual LevelĪlthough it is important to recognize that most people suffering from a mental illness are not dangerous, for those persons at risk for violence due to mental illness, suicidal thoughts, or feelings of desperation, mental health treatment can often prevent gun violence. The skills and knowledge of psychologists are needed to develop and evaluate programs and settings in schools, workplaces, prisons, neighborhoods, clinics, and other relevant contexts that aim to change gendered expectations for males that emphasize self-sufficiency, toughness, and violence, including gun violence. Such interventions need to be further tested for their potential to reduce gun violence. Preliminary evidence suggests that changing perceptions among males of social norms about behaviors and characteristics associated with masculinity may reduce the prevalence of intimate partner and sexual violence. Antecedents to Gun Violence: Gender and CultureĪny account of gun violence in the United States must be able to explain both why males are perpetrators of the vast majority of gun violence and why the vast majority of males never perpetrate gun violence. Such strategies must also attend to redirecting developmental antecedents and larger sociocultural processes that contribute to gun violence and gun-related deaths. Reducing incidents of gun violence arising from criminal misconduct or suicide is an important goal of broader primary and secondary prevention and intervention strategies. Prevention efforts can also reduce the relatively rare occasions when severe mental illness contributes to homicide or the more common circumstances when depression or other mental illness contributes to suicide. Prevention efforts guided by research on developmental risk can reduce the likelihood that firearms will be introduced into community and family conflicts or criminal activity. The most consistent and powerful predictor of future violence is a history of violent behavior. Although many youths desist in aggressive and antisocial behavior during late adolescence, others are disproportionately at risk for becoming involved in or otherwise affected by gun violence. Instead, gun violence is associated with a confluence of individual, family, school, peer, community, and sociocultural risk factors that interact over time during childhood and adolescence. For this reason, there is no single profile that can reliably predict who will use a gun in a violent act. Antecedents to Gun Violence: Developmental IssuesĪ complex and variable constellation of risk and protective factors makes persons more or less likely to use a firearm against themselves or others. More information and supporting citations can be found within the chapters themselves.
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Toward this end, in February 2013 the American Psychological Association commissioned this report by a panel of experts to convey research-based conclusions and recommendations (and to identify gaps in such knowledge) on how to reduce the incidence of gun violence - whether by homicide, suicide, or mass shootings - nationwide.įollowing are chapter-by-chapter highlights and short summaries of conclusions and recommendations of the report’s authors. Psychology can make important contributions to policies that prevent gun violence. It requires evidence-based, multifaceted solutions. Gun violence is an urgent, complex, and multifaceted problem.
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