Philip Cook is an economist who began studying and publishing on gun violence in the late 1970’s, and it would not be an overstatement to say that he has been the singularly most influential and significant scholar in this field for the past forty years. I’m two years older than Phil, so I can afford to be magnanimous in my praise of his academic work and impact on the field.

              Anthony Braga is a criminologist who ranks as the best and the brightest of the next generation of scholars producing original and important research on issues related to gun violence, in particular, the effectiveness of policing strategies which focus on proactive measures to control violent criminality occasioned by the use of guns.

              The good news is that working together, Braga and Cook have now produced a book-length study, Policing Gun Violence, whose title perfectly encapsulates their respective primary research concerns: Braga on cops and Cook on guns.

              What we get from this vaunted collaboration is an approach to understanding the how and why of reducing gun violence which creates a more penetrating and hopefully more productive narrative for reducing gun violence than what is being bandied around the gun-control community today.

              If you look at the messaging from the major gun-control organizations – Brady, Everytown, Giffords – what has now become the standard response to a couple of thousand fatal and non-fatal gun injuries each and every week is the idea that law-abiding gun owners have to keep their guns safe – use them safely, store them safely, sell them to someone else safely, on and on again and again.

              Where does Gun-control Nation get this nonsense?  They get it from public health researchers who have become enamored of the ‘consensus’ approach to gun violence, which means coming up with gun-control strategies acceptable to both sides.

              This would be like asking the CDC to come up with a solution for tobacco use that would be preferred by smokers, or maybe a way to deal with alcoholism by figuring out how to solve the problem which the binge-drinkers among us would also prefer.

              On the very first page of their spellbinding treatise, Braga and Cook waste no time getting to the heart of the matter: “Gun violence is a multifaceted problem requiring a multifaceted response. But an essential component of any comprehensive effort is more effective policing. Most instances in which one person shoots another are crimes.”

              Bingo! That’s it. We finally have an analysis of gun violence which starts at the beginning of the problem and not at the end. The end of gun violence is the guy lying in the street with a bullet in his head. The beginning of the problem is the decision by someone else to commit a violent crime. And that decision is in no way going to be influenced or affected by whether or the gun used in that assault was used safely or not.

              It’s too bad that one out of every seven or eight Americans lives in a crime-ridden, underserved, urban neighborhood. It’s too bad that many, if not most of the people living in those neighborhoods happen to be black. It’s too bad that the median household income for blacks is 40 percent lower than the median household income for whites. But mitigating and ultimately eliminating the ‘root causes’ of violence means nothing to the kid who disses another kid and then finds himself looking down the barrel of a gun.

              This past weekend two young guys got into an argument at the food court in my nearby shopping mall. One thing led to another, a gun got pulled out, a shot was fired and a third individual, described as an ‘innocent bystander’ fell down dead. This mall has a stated policy  as a gun-free zone. There are also armed security guards on continuous patrols.

              You think the guy who walked into this mall with a gun in his pocket spent one second thinking that he was violating the rules when he decided not to leave his gun out in his car? But the point of Braga and Cook’s book is an analysis of the methods and strategies that cops need to use to keep this guy from ever getting his hands on a gun.

              Which is why this book so timely, so coherent, and so important for everyone to read.