In the aftermath of last week's school shooting in Georgia, Jennifer Necci Dineen and Kerri M. Raissian from UConn’s ARMS Center contributed this compelling piece to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The entirety of the article is available here:
On Sept. 4, the United States experienced its 45th school shooting of 2024, this time at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith called the shooting “pure evil” and reported the suspected shooter would be tried as an adult. Since then, the shooter’s father has also been charged. A criminal justice response is vital, but it cannot be our only response. Gun laws need an overhaul. The failure to do so means that we will continue charging shooters and their families and attending the funerals of those senselessly killed. Laws are the role of government. Should elected officials fail to act (again), we think it is also fair to hold them responsible for the firearm violence killing our nation’s children. Georgia lawmakers have passed legislation to protect children in other ways. Georgia requires that children be at least 16 years old and to have held a learner’s permit for a year before they can drive: minors under 16 cannot be employed in dangerous or harmful jobs; and those under 17 cannot marry. These restrictions recognize that children’s prefrontal cortex, the part of their brain responsible for reasoning, impulse control and decision-making, is not yet fully formed. Yet, despite firearms being the leading cause of death for children in the United States, Georgia has minimal regulations governing children’s firearm access. There is no minimum age for purchasing or possessing rifles or shotguns, no permit required for carrying firearms in public (whether open or concealed) and no mandate for secure firearm storage (such as unloading, locking and storing ammunition separately). Details of the shooting in Winder continue to emerge, but let’s start with what we know. Reports indicate that the shooter and his father were questioned by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office in May 2023 following multiple anonymous tips about online threats, including images of guns. The suspect’s father claimed that his child did not have unfettered access to the guns. The authorities did not have probable cause for an arrest, and so they left and the guns stayed. And, in fact, the father bought his son a new gun — an AR-15 — as a Christmas present. Perhaps more disturbing is that this kind of negligence and indifference is not an anomaly. A similar set of facts surround the Nashville Waffle House shooter and the Michigan Oxford High School Shooter. In both cases, parents ignored warning signs and helped their sons keep or procure firearms that were used in mass shootings. Moreover, almost three-quarters of guns used in gun-related incidents at schools come from the home or someone the shooter knows. It’s fair to ask: Where are the parents? However, we also want to know where are the elected officials charged with keeping us and our children safe when they are at school, the movies, a parade or otherwise living their lives? Laws mandating secure firearm storage, permitting, minimum age requirements and background checks have been proven to lower firearm homicide rates. Emergency risk protection orders, or red-flag laws, which temporarily prevent individuals deemed a danger to themselves or others from possessing or purchasing firearms, have also been effective in reducing firearm homicides. Georgia’s failure to implement such regulations, allowing a child with underdeveloped decision-making skills to access a gun, means the state shares the blame for the gun-related injuries and deaths at Apalachee High School. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is right. It’s not the time to “talk about safety and policy.” The time was years ago, but it’s never too late to do the right thing. Kerri Raissian is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut; director of the University of Connecticut's UConn’s Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Violence Prevention; and co-director of the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP) Gun Violence Prevention Research Interest Group.
Her research focuses on child and family policy, with an emphasis on understanding how policies affect fertility, family formation, and family violence.
She is available to speak to media about this important topic simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
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What Families Need to Know about How to Safely Store Firearms at Home
Guns have been identified as the leading cause of death for children in the United States, making ongoing discussions about firearm safety especially important.
Kerri Raissian, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, and Jennifer Necci Dineen, associate director of the ARMS Center for Gun Injury Prevention, recently co-authored an very important piece for The Conversation titled detailing what families need to know about safely storing firearms at home.
There were 2,571 children age 1 to 17 who died in shootings in the U.S. in 2021, 68% more than the 1,531 that occurred in 2000. To help reduce the number of firearm-related deaths and injuries among children, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in January 2024 called upon school and district administrators to talk with parents and guardians about safe firearm storage practices. As experts on the safe storage of firearms – and as leaders of the University of Connecticut’s ARMS Center for Gun Injury Prevention – we often get questions about the best ways to keep guns out of the hands of children. We offer the following tips: 1: Safely store all of your firearms 2. Don’t assume you can hide your guns 3. Store ammunition separately 4. Learn to talk about firearm safety 5. Know the law 6. Invest in a quality safe and/or locking device The full piece is available here from The Conversation. Kerri Raissian is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut, director of the University of Connecticut's UConn’s Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Violence Prevention, and co-director of the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP) Gun Violence Prevention Research Interest Group. Her research focuses on child and family policy, with an emphasis on understanding how policies affect fertility, family formation, and family violence.
She is available to speak to media about this important topic simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
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Why does Alabama have more gun deaths than New York? UConn expert explains.
Only five million people live in Alabama, but the state has the fourth highest firearms death rate in the country.
In 2021, the state had 26.4 firearm deaths per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Compared to New York -a state with about 20 million people and a rate of 5.4 gun deaths per 100,000 in 2021 -the question becomes: Why does such a small state rank so high for gun violence?
UConn expert Kerri Raissian offered perspective and insight on the causes and reasons why these tragic incidents occur in specific regions and states more often across America in an interview with the Alabama Reflector: A 2019 brief published by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a nonprofit research center for the State University of New York (SUNY) system, said universal background checks, concealed carry permits and laws prohibiting people who have committed violent misdemeanors reduce gun homicides. “One policy that has come up against legal challenges recently has been not allowing people under the age of 21 years old to have certain guns or types of weapons,” Raissian said. “It is helpful. That age group has the highest risk of perpetuating homicides of any age group in the U.S.” Social policies can also deter gun violence. “It is laws, it is access to guns, it is also poverty,” Raissian said. “We have a lot of evidence that laws that you wouldn’t think have anything to do with gun violence, like Medicaid access, summer school for kids, employment opportunities for kids, are really good at reducing gun violence.” Raissian cited a randomized controlled trial of a youth summer employment program that was established in Chicago that had reduced incidents of gun violence compared to a control group. “It is not just about keeping them busy because these differences persist,” Raissian said. “It is also learning conflict resolution. It is also learning communication skills — all those things that come from employment and positive interactions tend to reduce violence of any form.” But Raissian and Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, both said no single law will solve the issues of gun violence. The full article is attached above, and well worth the read.
Kerri Raissian is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut, director of the University of Connecticut's UConn’s Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Violence Prevention, and co-director of the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP) Gun Violence Prevention Research Interest Group. She is available to speak to media about this important topic simply click on her icon now to arrange an interview today.
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Biography
Kerri M. Raissian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut. She was a Doris Duke Fellow for the Promotion of Child Well-Being and completed her doctoral degree in Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2013. Her research focuses on child and family policy with an emphasis on understanding how policies affect fertility, family formation, and family violence. Raissian’s research is interdisciplinary and draws on principles from program evaluation, economic demography, and applied microeconomics.
Raissian is the director of UConn’s Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Injury Prevention, the co-director of UConn’s Gun Violence Prevention – Research Interest Group (GVP-RIG), and the co-leader of the Connecticut Chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network. She has published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM), Child Maltreatment, Population Research and Policy Review, the European Journal of Ageing, among others. Her paper, “Hold Your Fire: Did the 1996 Federal Gun Control Act Expansion Reduce Domestic Homicides?” was awarded the 2016 Vernon Memorial Prize for the best paper in JPAM. She teaches financial management for public organizations, research methods, and social policy, and she has received teaching commendations for outstanding cumulative teaching evaluations from the University of Connecticut’s Provost’s Office on multiple occasions.
Prior to academia, she worked with abused adults and children in the government and nonprofit sectors. She currently engages agencies in Connecticut to continue this work.
Areas of Expertise
The impact of early childhood investments on child well-being
Role of policy in family violence and contraception subsidies
How policy generates family complexity, data collection and decision making in the child protective system
Where in Connecticut are violent deaths happening? A new project explains the trends.
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2025-04-23
When Kerri Raissan couldn't find information on local homicide and suicide trends, she and other researchers from the University of Connecticut built their own dashboard and maps with state data to track just that.
Launched in mid-March, the dashboard has data on all information on homicides and suicides, also known as violent deaths, from 2020 to 2024, showing where, when and how residents died.
Less than a week after we marked 12 years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, America was once again rocked by a school shooting, this time in Wisconsin.
And, in Connecticut, the fatal shooting of a young mother and her infant son in Hartford in November remains a painful reminder of the work still needed to curb gun violence.
Dr. Kerri Raissian has devoted her professional life to researching gun violence. She is director of the University of Connecticut’s A.R.M.S. initiative, which stands for Advancing Research, Methods and Scholarship in Gun Injury Prevention. She is at the forefront of efforts to address this crisis. Dr. Kerri Raissian has also been appointed by Gov. Ned Lamont to the state Commission on Community Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention.
NRA donations spike in counties that have experienced school shootings
Science online
2023-12-20
The finding, published today in Science Advances, echoes well-documented surges in gun purchases and donations to NRA, the leading U.S. gun rights lobbyist, after mass shootings. But the hyperlocal effect is new and revealing, researchers not involved in the study say. “Either there’s a fear … that someone is going to take your gun away … and/or a fear that you are somehow less safe and therefore need more guns,” says Kerri Raissian, who directs the Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship in Gun Injury Prevention at the University of Connecticut. “It says that there is something about this event happening in your county, local to you, that makes this threat more real.”
Here’s what to know about Connecticut’s gun laws, from background checks to backyard shooting
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2023-12-11
“Connecticut has some of the most robust and restrictive gun laws in the country,” said Kerri Raissian, a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut who has extensively studied the impact of state and federal gun laws.
Looking beyond mass shootings, Raissian said that Connecticut has also sought to prevent other types of gun violence through comprehensive safe-storage laws, restrictions on domestic abusers and funding for community anti-violence programs.
How SCOTUS' decision on a law disarming domestic abusers could impact you
Yahoo News online
2023-11-08
Kerri Raissian, director of the University of Connecticut's Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship in Gun Injury Prevention, spoke with Yahoo News about the potential implications of this Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Why does Alabama have more gun deaths than New York?
Alabama Reflector online
2023-05-30
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun safety advocacy group, the rate of gun deaths in Alabama increased 47% from 2011 to 2020, going from about 16 deaths per 100,000 people to almost 25 deaths per 100,000. The rest of the country saw gun death rates go up 33%.
The death rate for gun homicides in Alabama overtook the death rate for gun suicides for the first time ever in 2020 at about 11 deaths per 100,000 people. In other states, gun suicide death rates remain higher than homicide rates.
“That makes Alabama a little bit different,” said Kerri Raissian, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, who studies gun violence.
Lamont ready to ‘challenge the system’ with new gun safety measures in CT, if reelected
Hearst Connecticut Media print
2022-07-22
Kerri Raissian, the director of the University of Connecticut’s Gun Violence Prevention Research Interest Group, said that Connecticut has remained a leader in preventing gun violence — as evidenced by the state’s low number of per-capita deaths caused by firearms — even as some states have enacted their own restrictions and others have gone in the opposite direction by making it easier to purchase and carry weapons.
“Connecticut has continued to get more restrictive, while other states have gotten more permissive,” Raissian said. “Connecticut is adopting laws that research indicates work to reduce gun injury and death.”
What would it mean to treat guns the way we treat cars?
Vox online
2022-06-05
Contrast that with cars. When looking at the public health achievement of reducing motor vehicle deaths, safety improvements of cars and the introduction of driver-specific regulations paved the way, says Kerri Raissian, a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut. “The federal government incentivized the uptake of certain safety actions (by tying interstate money to the legal age of driving, for example) and states enforce road rules,” she wrote to me in an email. “It’s an achievement in terms of the outcome and coordination it took to get us here.”
“I understand the need for FEMA to guard against fraud, which is what this death certificate criteria is meant to do,” said Ms. Raissian, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, who has spent hours on the phone trying to retrieve her father’s medical files and speak to the doctor who certified his death.
But the strict requirements and the chaos surrounding so many deaths pose a problem, she said: “This policy all but guarantees many people who are entitled to these benefits will not get them.”
Breastfeeding and infant health link is not straight-forward
Science Daily online
2018-09-25
The researchers found that mothers who while pregnant said they intended to exclusively breastfeed, but then used formula once the baby was born, had children with health outcomes similar to exclusively breastfed infants. Only about half of mothers who intend to breastfeed are able to do so, and often their ability to breastfeed is beyond their control and not known until their baby is actually born.
"This access to health care is an important policy focus. By sinking so much energy into getting moms to breastfeed, we miss something very important: that access to health care and the ability to take medical advice is critically important to a mother and her infant," said Raissian. "By exploring factors influencing better infant health outcomes, information from the study helps contextualize the tradeoffs that a lot of mothers have to make when deciding how to feed their children."
How raising the minimum wage by $1 could reduce cases of child neglect
Consumer Affairs online
2017-08-18
Kerri Raissian and a colleague examined nine years of child maltreatment reports from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System.
They found that 30 states had minimum wages that exceeded the federal minimum wage by at least $1 during the study period, and that those same states had substantially fewer child neglect cases. While Bullinger and Raissian say that race was a non-factor when it came to their study, the results suggest that a higher minimum wage had no impact on neglect cases for teenagers.
Raising The Minimum Wage Has Benefits Way Beyond Creating More Wealth For Workers
Fast Company
To researchers Lindsey Bullinger and Kerri Raissian, this debate fails to acknowledge the wider importance of minimum wages in raising social standards–for example, the effect in reducing or contributing to violence in the home. In a new paper, they look at the relationship between states that have passed minimum wage increases and 30 years of official figures for child maltreatment. They find that every $1 increase in minimum wages results in 9,700–or almost 10%–fewer cases annually. Minimum wage levels affect household ability to buy clothing, food, and medical care, the researchers argue, affecting whether a child is likely to be mistreated...
In January 2024, Connecticut made legislative changes that effectively shut down the ability of many workers to obtain instant transfers of their own earned wages between pay periods. However, my new study with colleagues finds that the Connecticut General Assembly should reverse this and pass SB 1396 this session. Doing so would give Connecticut workers faster access to their earned wages and help them make ends meet.
On Sept. 4, the United States experienced its 45th school shooting of 2024, this time at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith called the shooting “pure evil” and reported the suspected shooter would be tried as an adult. Since then, the shooter’s father has also been charged.
A criminal justice response is vital, but it cannot be our only response. Gun laws need an overhaul. The failure to do so means that we will continue charging shooters and their families and attending the funerals of those senselessly killed. Laws are the role of government. Should elected officials fail to act (again), we think it is also fair to hold them responsible for the firearm violence killing our nation’s children.
After completing my undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt, I was hired as a victim-witness coordinator in the district attorney’s office in Nashville. I worked with domestic violence victims whose cases were advancing through the courts, and I believed our work made victims safer by holding abusers accountable and by providing services to victims, abusers and families. I was honored and highly motivated to do this work.
However, not all victims were so sure the court’s interventions would make them safer: Some felt more protected, but others would say, “It doesn’t matter what you do, if he wants to kill me, he will.” (About 80% of my clients were women.) I was at a professional crossroads: I could either keep working in the system and hoping my efforts were effective, or I could train to be a social scientist and build a research portfolio dedicated to exploring how policy and practice could reduce domestic violence victims’ risk of harm.
What families need to know about how to safely store firearms at home
The Conversation
Kerri Raissian and Jennifer Necci Dineen
2024-03-08
For the past few years, guns have been identified as the leading cause of death for children in the United States.
There were 2,571 children age 1 to 17 who died in shootings in the U.S. in 2021, 68% more than the 1,531 that occurred in 2000.
To help reduce the number of firearm-related deaths and injuries among children, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in January 2024 called upon school and district administrators to talk with parents and guardians about safe firearm storage practices.
A Sandy Hook reflection: Gun violence is preventable — if we want
CT Mirror
2022-12-14
It’s been 10 years since a gunman took 26 innocent lives at Sandy Hook Elementary — the lives of children and educators. And while this anniversary is difficult, it offers us an opportunity to reflect on gun violence policy in our state and nation.
On Monday I was honored to moderate a panel “How Sandy Hook Changed the Legal Environment,” to discuss the legal changes that have been made since Sandy Hook and to consider changes to consider ways to further prevent gun injury in our state.
Good Guys With Guns May Be Heroes—But They're Not Our Solution
Newsweek
Jennifer Necci Dineen and Kerri M. Raissian
2022-07-22
This past weekend, America experienced yet another mass shooting at Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana. Fortunately, an armed citizen was able to stop the shooter with his own, legally possessed gun. But his heroic success is rare, and while we applaud his courage and skill, "good guys" with guns can only (maybe) end future shootings. What we really need is to prevent them.
While it may ultimately be the case that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun," the truth is America's "good guys" have more guns than ever before, and sadly, they have not always stopped the shooter in time. The Texas House of Representatives preliminary report revealed that in Uvalde, Texas, 376 police waited to engage the active shooter for 77 minutes due to systemic failures and miscommunication. Such failures were also seen in Parkland, Fla. in 2018, when 17 students and staff were killed.
It's time for COVID-19 disaster relief ... for mothers
The Hill
Kerri M. Raissian and Jennifer Necci Dineen
2020-11-23
That next wave of COVID-19 is here and no place in the country seems safe from rapidly rising infection rates. While the effects of COVID will be felt in many social and economic sectors, the American family is about to be upended. As public schools from New York City to Denver to Los Angeles shift to remote learning, mothers are bracing for disaster.
Without necessary disaster relief, this is going to get increasingly and needlessly ugly. We must recognize that parents — and mothers in particular — are struggling to meet their dual employment and childcare responsibilities. Though many parents are juggling, women provide the majority of childcare — even in dual earner households. Women are leaving the labor force at higher rates than men simply because they can’t do it all.
Money matters: Does the minimum wage affect child maltreatment rates?
Children and Youth Services Review
2017
Research has consistently demonstrated that children living in low-income families, particularly those in poverty, are at a greater risk of child maltreatment; however, causal evidence for this relationship is sparse. We use child maltreatment reports from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System: Child File from 2004 to 2013 to investigate the relationship between changes in a state's minimum wage and changes in child maltreatment rates. We find that increases in the minimum wage lead to a decline in overall child maltreatment reports, particularly neglect reports. Specifically, a $1 increase in the minimum wage implies a statistically significant 9.6% decline in neglect reports. This decline is concentrated among young children (ages 0–5) and school-aged children (ages 6–12); the effect diminishes among adolescents and is not significant. We do not find that the effect of increases in the minimum wage varies based on the child's race. These findings are robust to a number of specifications. Our results suggest that policies that increase incomes of the working poor can improve children's welfare, especially younger children, quite substantially.
Hold Your Fire: Did the 1996 Federal Gun Control Act Expansion Reduce Domestic Homicides?
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
2016
In 1996, Congress expanded the federal Gun Control Act (GCA) to prohibit defendants convicted of a qualifying domestic violence misdemeanor from possessing or purchasing a firearm. Using the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports along with homicide data collected from selected state law enforcement agencies, I investigate if this expansion was successful in reducing homicides among the target groups. I use variation from a legal loophole and a series of circuit court decisions to generate difference-in-differences estimates. I find evidence that the GCA expansion led to 17 percent fewer gun-related homicides among female intimate partner victims and 31 percent fewer gun homicides among male domestic child victims. The law also has protective benefits for those that were not targeted by the legislation. “Other” family members (parents and siblings) also experience a 24 percent reduction in gun homicides. I find no evidence that reductions in gun homicides were offset by an increase in nongun homicides. While most falsification and robustness tests support the above conclusions, some tests suggest caution when interpreting the results and a need for further research.
Parental disability, parent care, and offspring mental health outcomes
Population Research and Policy Review
2016
Decades of research supports a widely held view that providing parent care is stressful, and that these stresses are associated with adverse mental health outcomes. However, some recent studies suggest an additional possibility, namely that “noncaregiver stress”—a consequence of having a parent with major care needs, but not being an active caregiver—may be a serious problem as well. This finding emerges in data which permit separate controls for parental needs for care and offspring provision of parent care. We extend these results using Generations and Gender Programme data from five countries—Bulgaria, France, Georgia, Romania, and Russia—for which the necessary variables can be comparably measured. Our outcome variable is a depression score based on a 7-item scale. In country-specific regressions, we find two instances of statistically significant associations of depression with the regular provision of personal care to a parent with care needs, i.e., the usual “caregiver stress” result. However, we also find two instances of statistically significant differences in respondents’ depressive symptoms that are associated with having a parent with care needs, i.e., instances of “noncaregiver stress.” We find limited evidence of gender-specific responses to both forms of stress. Our evidence supports both the typical caregiver stress response and the less-studied noncaregiver stress response, which suggests the need for additional research.
Does unemployment affect child abuse rates? Evidence from New York State
Child Abuse & Neglect
2015
This article used child maltreatment reports from New York State from 2000 to 2010 to investigate the relationship between county level unemployment and county level child maltreatment rates. Models showed that a 1 percentage point increase in unemployment rates reduced the child report rate by approximately 4.25%. Report rates for young children (children under the age of 6) and older children (children ages 6 and over) responded similarly to changes in local unemployment, but the relationship between unemployment rates and child maltreatment reports did vary by a county's metropolitan designation. The negative relationship between unemployment and child maltreatment reports was largely contained to metropolitan counties. The relationship between unemployment and child maltreatment reports in non-metropolitan counties was often positive but not statistically significant. These findings were robust to a number of specifications. In alternate models, the county's mandated reporter employment rate was added as a control; the inclusion of this variable did not alter the results.
Mandating prescription contraception coverage: effects on contraception consumption and preventive health services
Population Research and Policy Review
2015
While recent national discussions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) made the introduction of mandated contraceptive coverage within health insurance policies seem like a novel idea, it is not new at all. Since the late 1990s, 29 states have mandated that insurance providers include prescription contraceptive supplies and, in some instances, associated contraceptive services in their coverage. We use state-level policy variation to generate both difference-in-differences and triple difference estimates to determine if women in states with state-level contraception supply or contraception supply and services insurance mandates experienced changes in their utilization of contraception and preventive health care services. We find a positive relationship between these policies and prescription contraception use for those with low educational attainment, but the results are not robust to a variety of specifications. Our results also show an increase in the consumption of preventive health services for women with low educational attainment as a result of these health insurance mandates. We conclude by discussing the implications for the ACA.
