Committee Chair

Dierenfeldt, Rick

Committee Member

Hancock, Katelyn; Denney, Andrew

Department

Dept. of Criminal Justice and Legal Assistant Studies

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Gun crime continues to represent a substantial threat to public safety in the United States. Firearms are disproportionately involved in most crimes of violence, particularly murder (Collins et al., 2017; Cook & Pollack, 2017; Goldsmith et al., 2022; Johnson et al., 2021), and firearm-related offending is more pronounced in the U.S. than any other industrialized nation (Carson et al., 2022). A large body of literature has examined the extent to which characteristics of communities, place, victims, and offenders contribute to the likelihood and frequency of gun violence. Yet the vast majority of these works have restricted their analyses to single-offender, single-victim cases, effectively inhibiting our understanding of the factors that contribute to the likelihood that gun crimes become multi-victim events. I address this gap in the literature through application of binary logistic regression to 1,291 shootings that occurred in the city of Chattanooga between 1/1/13 and 12/30/24.

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by Grant No. 15PBJA-24-GG-03112-CVIP awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the SMART Office. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Degree

M. A.; A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts.

Date

5-2026

Subject

Firearms--Law and legislation--United States; Firearms and crime--Social aspects--Chattanooga; Juvenile recidivists--Chattanooga--Statistics

Keyword

gun crime; firearm offending; juvenile crime; criminal justice; gun violence

Document Type

Masters theses

DCMI Type

Text

Extent

ix, 52 leaves

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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