Situational and Victim Correlates of Increased Case Fatality Rates in Los Angeles Shootings, 2005-2021.

The gun assault case fatality rate measures the fraction of shooting victims who die from their wounds. Considerable debate has surrounded whether gun assault case fatality rates have changed over time and what factors may be involved. We use crime event data from Los Angeles to examine the victim and situational correlates of gun assault case fatality rates over time. We estimated log binomial regression models for the probability of death in each year from 2005 to 2021, conditioned on situational and victim characteristics of the crime. Case fatality rates increased by around 1.3% per year between 2005 and 2021 from around 15.9 to 19.7%. Baseline case fatality rates differed systematically by most situational and victim but followed similar temporal trends. Only victim age significantly covaried with the temporal trend in case fatality rates. An individual shot in Los Angeles in 2021 was 23.7% more likely to die than the equivalent victim in 2005. The steady increase in case fatality rates suggests that there were around 394 excess fatalities over what would have occurred if case fatality rates remained at the 2005 level. Increases in the average age of victims over time may contribute to the general temporal trend. We hypothesize that older victims are more likely to be shot indoors where lethal close-range wounds are more likely.

Extreme Violence and Weight-Related Outcomes in Mexican Adults.

Sociological research suggests that violent environments contribute to excess weight, a pressing health issue worldwide. However, this research has neglected extreme forms of violence, such as armed conflicts, a theoretically significant omission because armed conflict could reasonably lead to weight loss, not weight gain. I examine the weight-related, short-term consequences of the Mexican "War on Organized Crime." I combine body mass index (N = 3,341) and waist circumference (N = 3,509) measures from the Mexico Family Life Survey with a novel data set on aggressions, confrontations, and executions between 2009 and 2011 (CIDE-PPD database) and exploit variation in the timing of the outcome relative to violent events taking place in the same residential environment. I find a robust and large positive association between armed conflict events and weight gain in adults and suggestive evidence of the behavioral, emotional, and physiological/biochemical pathways connecting those variables.

On Lethal Interactions: Differences Between Expressive and Instrumental Homicides in Mexico City.

Research on violence in Mexico and Latin America suggests that, in part, due to state attempts to fight organized crime and the widespread availability of firearms, violence and homicides in general have experienced a recent shift from expressive to instrumental. Despite this transformation, however, socioeconomically disadvantaged young males continue to be overwhelmingly present in homicide events. We argue that both the use of a firearm and demographic and traditional socioeconomic factors should independently predict instrumental homicide; however, the association between the use of a firearm and instrumentality should be moderated by the level or category of these traditional characteristics (i.e., socioeconomic status, age, and gender). Our findings are broadly consistent with these claims. We show that the relationship between the use of a firearm and instrumental homicides is larger for homicides involving disadvantaged males as victims because this group is more at risk of suffering homicidal violence to begin with, despite the fact that independently (i.e., with no interactions), higher socioeconomic status, age, and female victimhood are positively associated with instrumentality. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on Latin American violence and the expressive/instrumental distinction.