“What does it depend on?”: Perceptions of safety related to firearms in homes and neighborhoods

Background Though research has established that firearms in the home increase risk for injury and death, a substantial number of Americans, especially gun owners, believe that guns make their homes safer. More than half of gun owners in a nationally-representative survey said “it depends” when asked whether guns make their homes safer or more dangerous, but little is known about the factors that affect perceived safety. Objective To determine whether the relationship between the presence of firearms and perceived home or neighborhood safety is fixed or depends on additional factors and to identify the additional factors on which it depends. Methods A mixed-methods cross-sectional analysis of the 2018 state-representative California Safety and Wellbeing Survey (n = 2558, completion rate 49%), including calculation of weighted proportions and qualitative analysis of write-in responses. Findings One in six respondents (17.2%, 95% CI 14.9% to 19.7%) reported “it depends” when asked whether a gun in their home made the home a safer or more dangerous place to be (“the home scenario”). One in six (16.6%, 95% CI 14.3% to 19.2%) reported “it depends” when asked whether the neighborhood would be safer if all neighbors had guns in the home (“the neighborhood scenario”). For the home scenario, 28.3% (95% CI 21.9% to 35.7%) cited firearm owner characteristics (e.g., training and proficiency, temperament, and mental health), 28.4% (95% CI 22.3% to 35.5%) cited firearm storage and access, and 28.0% (95% CI 21.5% to 35.7%) cited intended use for guns as factors affecting perceived safety. For the neighborhood scenario, respondents overwhelmingly cited gun owner characteristics (72.1%, 95% CI 63.4% to 79.3%). Factors on which “it depends” varied by gun ownership status. Conclusion Perceived safety when firearms are in the home depends on numerous factors. Understanding these factors may inform tailored, targeted messaging and interventions for firearm injury prevention.

Dis/connection: Violence, Religion, and Geographic Imaginings in Aceh and Colonial Indonesia, 1890s–1920s

This article draws attention to the case of Aceh to analyse the mechanisms through which ideologically driven geographic imaginings obscured the role of place and class in colonial and anti-colonial violence in Indonesia. Its main perspective is the region's West Coast. In the course of the long and brutal Dutch-Acehnese war (1873–1942), the West Coast of Sumatra was transformed from a dynamic centre of trade, commerce, and religious renewal into a colonial frontier. Violent resistance persisted in this area as the Dutch involved themselves in and exacerbated local contestations for authority and resources. Colonial discourse worked to conceal these complexities, foregrounding an image of the West Coast as a remote, backwards, and inherently dangerous place, prone to a violent Muslim millenarianism.

The Visibility of Sound: Acoustic Archaeology in the Blue Ridge Mountains

Waterfalls are documented among Indigenous peoples as settings for the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and locations sacred to life transitions. Eastern Woodlands ethnographic literature identifies waterfalls as places where life emerges in the presence of danger, requiring the acknowledgement of those who travel near them. In the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, ceramic-bearing Middle and Late Woodland sites near named waterfalls are associated with small sites located outside the topographic parameters of modeled site locations and containing non-local or unique objects. Sound mapping with calibrated decibel meters, survey-grade GPS, and inverse distance weighted interpolation demonstrate a correspondence between the location of the small sites and natural sound magnification. The small sites and the deposited objects may represent the offerings of travelers made aware of the sacred/dangerous place by the sound of the waterfall. Acoustic archaeology is introduced as a practice that takes into consideration sensory experience as central to place identity.

Experimental and numerical modeling to investigate the riverbank’s stability

The purpose of this paper is to assess the failure mechanism of riverbanks due to stream flow experimentally and numerically to avoid recurring landslides by identifying the most dangerous place and treating them by a suitable method. The experiments and the physical models were carried out to study the failure mechanism of riverbank and evaluation of their stability in two cases: short-term condition and long-term condition flow where three models were tested. The Tigris River (Iraq) is considered as a model in this paper in terms of the applied velocity and modeled soil of the banks it was used at the same characteristics in the prototype scale. Also, a numerical simulation was performed using the FLOW-3D program to determine the velocity distribution and to identify the areas subjected to the high stress levels through the water flow. The obtained results in this paper are inspecting of failure mechanism types that occur under the influence of specific limits of flow velocity, which have shown good compatibility with the type of failure in the prototype scale. In addition to calculating the amount of soil erosion, the failure angle, and the amount of soil settlement at the riverbank model is investigated also. The results of experimental work and numerical simulation were well matched, where the standard error rate for Froude number ranged between (1.8%–6.6%), and the flow depth between (2.7%–6.9%).

MOTIFS OF “NATIVE” AND “ANOTHER” IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE “DOTTED LINE-NOVEL” “KHURRAMABAD” BY A. VOLOS

The article deals with the role of the oppositions of «native» and «other» in the novel «Khurramabad» by A. Volos (2000). From «locus amoenus» Khurramabad turns into a dangerous place marked by violence and grief. All narratives of the novel are organized in chronological order: from the early 1930s to the 1990s, which was the time of mass departure of Russians and the civil war. Their sequence is due first to the Russian mastering of “another” («foreign») world, and then catastrophic loss of native city, property, and finally emigration to an unfriendly Russian countryside. The growing alienation of the characters ends with the author’s own alienation in the final essay «Khujand Dotted Line».

Peter Sloterdijk’s Technopolitics. How Technology Redesigns the Environment and the Polis

This paper will analyse the role played by technology in Peter Sloterdijk’s theory, where he seeks to redefine and reconstruct ethics, society and democracy. Indeed, the philosopher’s project is to build a new kind of society, which risks being antidemocratic and elitist: technopolitics. This lemma refers to Sloterdijk’s reconfiguration of the social structure through the elimination of the human rights paradigm in a technological and anti-egalitarian manner. In order to do this, Sloterdijk redesigns the environment as a dangerous place whose rules cannot be followed, and which must be reshaped through technology. Hence, the philosopher reduces ethics to technology, and reinterprets society on the basis of new techno-ethical premises which support a hierarchical and selective new polis.

Losing in the Courts

The Hage family and the Dann sisters grazed livestock on federal lands in Nevada through the last three sagebrush rebellions. Their stories illustrate the frustrations that many ranchers had with evolving federal land law and management over the last fifty years, as they went from being the dominant users of federal rangeland to one of multiple, competing users. Unlike the Bundy family, the Hages and the Danns battled the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service largely in court, fighting to defend what they believed were either private property rights or Native American treaty rights. After four decades of political and legal conflict, neither family is able to graze livestock on federal lands. When militia force means victory and courts mean defeat, the federal land has become a dangerous place.

Safe Haven or Dangerous Place? Stereotype Amplification and Americans’ Perceived Risk of Terrorism, Violent Street Crime, and Mass Shootings

People overestimate the risk of some events, such as terrorist attacks and immigrant crimes, but not of others. Stereotype amplification theory indicates that politicized, out-group stereotypes may be to blame. We examine Americans’ perceptions of the risk that different forms of violence—out-group, in-group and non-racialized—will occur in their local communities. We hypothesize that negative stereotypes of immigrants and Muslims will increase the perceived risk of out-group violence but not of other forms of violence. Analyses of original survey data from a sample of 1,068 Americans reveal four findings: (1) most Americans accurately perceive home-grown violence to be more likely than violence by foreigners, (2) political identification and ideology strongly predict out-group stereotypes, (3) out-group stereotypes strongly predict the perceived risk of out-group violence but are not significantly associated with risk perceptions for other forms of violence and (4) vulnerability factors predict risk perceptions for all forms of violence.