Global Guns, Violence and Criminology

Abstract

These four books published recently reflect, in their different ways, how criminology is coming to grapple with questions of firearms and violence. These are timely topics; at home, in Europe and across the wider world, gun violence has seldom been out of the news. In the United Kingdom, following the recent Inquest verdict and the coroner’s report on the Plymouth mass shooting of 2021, not forgetting a series of domestic killings with lawfully held weapons (in Sussex 2020; Skye 2022; Cambridge 2023; and Epsom 2023) the licensing of firearms is under urgent review. In Hamburg, Germany, eight people died during a mass shooting in the city, the fourth such event in Germany in two decades. Concerns have arisen over allegedly lax firearm laws and the failure of police to act on information received anticipating the attack. Meanwhile, in the United States, the killing has continued unabated. As of 5 March 2023, 5,149 people had been killed by gunfire in the year so far, a rise of 75% on the same period in 2022, while the shooting at the Covenant school in Nashville marked the 131st mass shooting in the United States this year. Yet, while gun violence in the United States and the global North regularly makes the news and the United States is widely viewed as exceptional in this regard, as Wallace points out in his powerful collection, rates of gun violence are much higher in many Southern, poor, developing and highly weaponized societies. It is just that we do not hear so much about it and seldom reflect upon the colonial legacies often responsible.