Research Team
Project Overview
Project Overview
Researchers from the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, Northeastern University, and CJP are working to evaluate California’s Armed and Prohibited Persons System (APPS), which is a law enforcement intervention that seeks to recover firearms from individuals who purchased them legally but subsequently became prohibited from having access to firearms.
Reasons for losing the legal right to own firearms include being convicted for a violent crime, hospitalized for mental illness associated with dangerousness to self or others, or being the subject of a domestic violence restraining order. These factors are often strongly associated with increased risk of future violence, but prior to APPS, no systematic efforts were made to recover firearms from this group.
APPS, an initiative of the California Department of Justice, uses that agency’s archive of firearm transfers to identify firearm owners among individuals who become prohibited persons under California or federal law. APPS then seeks to recover those firearms and thereby prevent both interpersonal and self-directed violence. The evaluation work is ongoing. However, preliminary findings suggest that APPS does not generate population-level reductions in gun violence. The APPS intervention directly affects a very small percentage of the population, limiting its potential for jurisdiction-wide impacts. Individual-level analyses may yield more appropriate estimates of program impacts.
