But police determined it was actually a pellet gun. Police agencies such as Chambersburg Police told the Public Opinion they do not keep records on when imitation or fake guns are used in crimes, as opposed to real weapons, so finding an exact number of crimes is nearly impossible without looking into the case details of every incident reported to police.īut looking at the crimes committed in recent months and in years prior where imitation guns are used, the same problems from 25 years ago still exist.Įarlier this month, two men entered a Shippensburg Township home through a window and threatened six people with a knife and a gun that at first appeared to be a semi-automatic pistol.
The researchers went to police and sheriff's departments across the country, looking for instances where imitation guns were used during criminal activity.Īt the time, they found four main categories of incidents that imitation guns were involved in: The study was done coinciding with the law to add new markings to these imitation guns, to help differentiate them as mandated by the law. The problem with toy and imitation guns is their often near identical appearance to the real thing, as documented in the research project called "Toy guns: Involvement in crime and encounters with the police" which was commissioned by the United States Congress in 1990.
People still use these fake guns when committing crimes - including in quite a few serious incidents in Franklin County - and police must assume the weapons are real. In the meantime, it seems fair to conclude from the available evidence that the type of weapon is not an incidental aspect of violent crime, but rather has a substantial influence on the nature of the encounter and its likely consequences.Watch Video: Watch: PO reporter tests gun simulationįRANKLIN COUNTY - It's been more than a quarter century since United States lawmakers changed the rules in an effort to better differentiate toy and imitation guns from the real - and deadly - thing, but the system remains far from foolproof. Future research should be directed toward remedying this problem.
Not much research of this sort has been done, in part because it is difficult to find a suitable measure for gun availability. In principle, these predictions could be tested directly by observing the effects of changes in gun availability on statistical characterizations of violent crime patterns. This analysis suggests a number of predictions concerning the effects of gun availability on the number, distribution, and seriousness of violent crimes. On the other hand, the victim is less likely to be injured in a gun robbery than in other robberies, since the gun robber usually does not feel the need to employ physical force. Guns are also more dangerous than other weapons, in the sense that victims of robbery and assault are more likely to be killed if the assailant uses a gun. Some of the patterns of gun use in violent crime can be readily interpreted in terms of relative vulnerability of different types of victims.
Hence, gun availability facilitates robbery of commercial places and lethal assaults on people who would ordinarily be able to defend themselves against other weapons. Guns are particularly valuable against relatively invulnerable targets. A gun is usually superior to other weapons readily available for use in violent crime even in the hands of a weak and unskilled assailant, a gun poses a credible threat and can be used to kill quickly, from a distance, and in a relatively "impersonal" fashion. This essay presents a variety of evidence to the effect that the widespread availability of firearms contributes to the criminal homicide rate and influences violent crime patterns in several other respects as well. Firearms are used in a minority of violent crimes but are of special concern because more than 60 percent of the most serious crimes-criminal homicides-are committed with firearms. The spectacular increases in violent crime that began in the mid-1960s continue, and Americans are currently being murdered, robbed, and raped at historically unprecedented rates.
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