Tackling gun violence: is systems thinking necessary?

Gun violence is a global epidemic claiming thousands of lives every year. In the United Stated alone, almost 25,000 lives are lost every year due to gun-inflicted suicides. In this paper, we argue for an inclusion of systems thinking methodologies in tackling gun violence. As a first step of an inductive reasoning approach, we illustrate the pitfalls of traditional reductionist methods, by analyzing open-source data collated in the United States by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The specific goal of this exploratory risk analysis is estimating the probability of a police officer being feloniously killed during an incident. We explore the correlations between factors such as police department size and demographics with the probability of an officer being feloniously killed. Using similarity measures, we also benchmark the performance of police departments, to compare them to other similar sized departments. Our exploratory analyses indicate that a critical officer ratio of 5 officers per thousand population covered could lower the probability of police officers being feloniously killed. Moreover, the total number of female police officers, as a percentage of a department’s force, needs to be increased. Via this process of risk estimation, we identify various difficulties that confound traditional operational research methodologies, arguing for the inclusion of a systems thinking toolkit to tackle gun violence. In particular, dovetailing traditional OR with a soft systems methodology (SSM) may be needed to tackle gun violence effectively.