Identifying Local Level Strategies: North Carolina County Commissioners’ Perceptions of Firearm Violence Prevention Interventions

Case studies are an effective vehicle for telling important stories that may have broader implications, but how is the research study made relevant, or generalizable, to other places or events? This paper discusses the upscaling of Action Research where Action Research was the starting point at the local level that led to additional layers with larger, regional scale implications. The story behind the development process and resulting built form of Windy Ridge, a relatively new subdivision in Charlotte, North Carolina dubbed a “Neighborhood Built to Fail,” presents a compelling story. We trace the development of knowledge around three topics originating in Action Research and how we scaled those topics up to have policy implications: (1) owner occupancy and absentee landlords; (2) stability, instability, and neighborhood resiliency; and (3) zoning changes and environmental justice issues. We reflect on implications for practitioners and academics based on several years of neighborhood partnership and how Action Research can reveal structural issues at work within communities. Action Research findings provided a research- and evidence-based platform from which to advocate for neighborhood change and the motivation for the extended research. This approach produced an expanding research model emanating from Action Research data and questions originating with residents.

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Report on an Analytic Network Process (ANP) Model to Estimate the Benefits, Opportunities, Costs, and Risks (BOCR) that Gun Policies and Violence Prevention Interventions have on Legal Users of Firearms

International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process ◽

10.13033/ijahp.v13i2.909 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Luis G Vargas ◽

Amos N. Guiora ◽

Marcel C. Minutolo

Keyword(s):

Violence Prevention ◽

Analytic Network Process ◽

Federal Agencies ◽

Pairwise Comparisons ◽

Analytic Hierarchy ◽

Prevention Interventions ◽

Network Process ◽

Zero Sum ◽

The Impact ◽

Hierarchy Process

Balancing public good with individual rights is a difficult task; gun policies attempt to do just this. To ensure public safety, local, state, and federal agencies piece together policies that each entity believes will meet the needs of public welfare. When legislating new gun policies, the impact the policies have on gun owners are perceived as a zero-sum game; some groups are perceived to gain while others think they are losing, but the reality is much more nuanced. The reason the impact of these policies on all lawful gun owners has been considered a zero-sum game is largely because to date there has been no research measuring the impact. Further, there have been no attempts to quantify the impact that the policies have on lawful gun owners. The sole argument that has been made is about constitutionality. In this paper, we develop an approach based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The approach allows us to develop criteria for evaluating the impact of these policies on lawful gun owners and generate priorities for the criteria from pairwise comparisons. Criteria are compared in pairs, thus the term pairwise comparisons. This allows us to score, as with a scorecard model, gun policies for various types of gun owners with respect to the criteria according to the Benefits, Opportunities, Costs, and Risks, thereby determining the impact of each policy.

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