Modeling the impact of civilian firearm ownership in the evolution of violent crimes

We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the evolution of violent crimes. For such purpose, we built a model based on ordinary differential equations that take into account the number of violent crimes and the number of legal and illegal guns. The dynamics is governed by probabilities, modeling for example the police action, the risk perception regarding crimes that leads to increase of ownership of legal guns, and so on. Our analytical and numerical results show that, in addition to the rise of criminality due to the presence of illegal guns, the increase of legal guns leads to a fast increase of violent crimes, suggesting that the access of firearms by civilians is not a good option regarding the control of crimes. (C) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study proposes a simple mathematical model to describe the evolution of violent crimes. It finds that, in addition to the impact of illegal guns, an increase in legal guns also leads to a rapid increase in violent crimes, indicating that civilian access to firearms is not a good option for crime control.