A Yale study finds that gun violence is a ‘contagious’ social epidemic. Gun violence is sometimes described as a public health concern, due to its alarmingly high levels in certain populations.
The Yale study, published online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has established a model to predict how “contagious” the epidemic is.
The researchers studied the probability of an individual becoming the victim of gun violence by analyzing a social network of people arrested together on the same offense during an 8-year period in Chicago. Researchers found that more than 60% of all gun violence during this time period happened in “cascades”, or connected chains, through these particular social networks.