UCLA Study Highlights How Alcohol Use Contributes to Firearm-Involved Suicide
A new UCLA study shows an association between acute alcohol use and a higher probability of firearm-involved suicide in the United States. The findings published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s online open-access journal, JAMA Network Open, also suggest a point of alcohol intoxication where individuals have a lower degree of motor coordination, resulting in a lower probability of using a firearm in suicide. As alcohol consumption increases, the probability of a firearm-involved suicide normally increases. But at a specific blood alcohol concentration level — around 0.40 grams per deciliter (g/dL) for men and 0.30 g/dL for women — the probability starts to decrease. The study was co-authored by Mark S. Kaplan, professor of social welfare, and Shannon Lange of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. “Our study is a unique and important contribution to our understanding of risk factors associated with suicides involving firearms, which account for over half of all suicides — more than 47,000 in 2021 — in the United States,” Kaplan said. In the cross-sectional study, the dose-response relationship between blood alcohol concentration and the probability of using a firearm as the method of suicide is described as an inverted U-shape for both male and female decedents. The study used mortality data from the National Violent Death Reporting System from 2003-2020. The analyses were restricted to solitary or single-victim suicides among men and women 18 years and older. The authors urge interventions targeting heavy alcohol use, which may bolster efforts to reduce the suicide mortality rate, particularly those involving a firearm.
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Seaside Prize Recognizes Shoup’s Pioneering Work on Parking Reform
Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, received the 2023 Seaside Prize, which honors those who have significantly influenced how towns and cities are built and rebuilt to promote walkability, affordability, diversity, beauty and sustainability. The nonprofit Seaside Institute cited Shoup’s decades of radical rethinking regarding parking policy: “In his groundbreaking 2005 book ‘The High Cost of Free Parking’ and his work since then, Shoup changed the way cities view the relationship between parking and the built environment, traffic congestion, energy consumption and local economic development.” The Congress for the New Urbanism recently republished its original review of the book, which it credited with sparking a recent surge of parking reforms across the country. Shoup accepted his award at a symposium in Seaside, Florida, a community designed around the principles of New Urbanism. When he launched into the study of parking decades ago, the topic was “the lowest rung on the status ladder,” he said, but times have changed. “Attitudes toward planning for parking are beginning to shift from thoughtless acceptance to thoughtful criticism, and many planners now agree that parking reforms are necessary. Parking is far too important not to study.” The symposium featured other members of the UCLA Luskin community including doctoral student M. Nolan Gray, author of “Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It,” and alumnus William Fulton, an urban planning consultant, author and former government official who studied under Shoup in the 1980s and helped present the Seaside Prize.
Watch the Seaside Prize award ceremony
A Closer Look at UCLA’s Own ‘Justice League’
They come from everywhere — unapologetic revolutionaries and leading voices in causes across the spectrum of social justice. They seek resources and space to recharge, regroup and, often, to plan the next stage of their struggle — all while planting seeds to grow the next generation of activists. Recently profiled in UCLA Magazine, they are part of the university’s Activist-in-Residence program, launched in 2016 by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy (II&D). The program has hosted 11 activists, including four this year, with areas of expertise that include tenants’ rights, food insecurity, climate change, support for incarcerated people, ethnic storytelling and protection for the unhoused. “Their presence transforms our classrooms and our research centers,” said Ananya Roy, founding director of II&D and a professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography. “It’s this shared terrain of scholarship across universities and movements that we see to be very fertile ground for making change.” Other campus hosts include the Asian American Studies Center and cityLAB-UCLA. The magazine piece includes mini-profiles of five of UCLA’s Activists-in Residence.
Lytle Hernández Receives Bancroft Prize in American History
Kelly Lytle Hernández, professor of history, African American studies and urban planning, has been awarded the 2023 Bancroft Prize for her book “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands.” The book tells the story of the band of Mexican rebels, led by journalist and dissident Ricardo Flores Magón, that helped spark the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia University, the Bancroft Prize is considered one of the most prestigious honors for writing on American history and diplomacy. “Bad Mexicans” was also a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in the nonfiction category, and was named one of New Yorker magazine’s best of 2022. The book focuses on how Flores Magón and his magonistas — intellectuals, poor workers, dispossessed rural dwellers and other marginalized groups — waged a campaign to overthrow U.S.-backed Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. Drawing on archives in both Mexico and the United States, the book explores how the cross-national movement threatened not only Díaz, who would eventually be deposed, but Mexican elites and powerful American capitalist interests that benefited from Díaz’s economic policies. In announcing the award, the Bancroft Prize jury praised Lytle Hernández’s “riveting story of revolution and counterrevolution,” adding that the book “helps shift the boundaries of what constitutes American history.” Lytle Hernández, who was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2019, is also the author of “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol” and “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.”
Todd Franke, Agile Visual Analytics Lab to Evaluate Suicide Prevention Programs
Social Welfare Professor Todd Franke and the Agile Visual Analytics Lab at UCLA Luskin have been awarded $1.8 million by the state’s Department of Public Health to evaluate two youth suicide prevention efforts in California. In response to an increase in youth suicide rates during the pandemic, California public health officials have launched two projects:
- A data-driven, targeted, community-based suicide prevention outreach campaign for youth at increased risk of suicide.
- A new approach to making youth suicide attempts reportable public health events to trigger crisis response efforts and allow support to be provided more readily at the local level for impacted schools and communities.
The funds will support evaluation of these programs led by Ashley Long, senior research associate at Agile Visual Analytics Lab. The lab was founded by Franke and Robert Blagg in 2014 to help provide stakeholders with data visualizations that meet diverse and dynamic information needs.
Here are examples of AVAL’s work:
UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute Presents Research to Stakeholders in Washington, D.C.
Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas of the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute (UCLA LPPI) recently presented research about Latino voters in the United States to political campaigners, media stakeholders and advocates meeting in the nation’s capital. During “Majority Makers !Presente!” hosted by TelevisaUnivision at the Washington headquarters of the National Association of Broadcasters, Dominguez-Villegas also previewed the forthcoming U.S. Latino Data Hub. This publicly available web tool will explore Latino well-being across all 50 states in a clear, disaggregated and reliable data platform. “To successfully reach Latino voters, campaign managers and organizers need to understand that there is great dynamism and complexity in the factors that impact Latino voter behavior, and the Latino Data Hub provides a window to understand that diversity and complexity through key indicators like educational attainment, income or health care,” said Dominguez-Villegas, co-director of research for UCLA LPPI. Dominguez-Villegas provided context based on UCLA LPPI research for stakeholders looking to effectively engage with Latinos. He pointed out that political preferences are driven by the rich mosaic of Latino communities and thus more diverse than many assume. Understanding this dynamism is critical in reaching Latino voters, he said. They should be viewed not as monolithic but as a rich and diverse community that has varied, and sometimes rapidly changing, demographic and socioeconomic trends. Another topic of discussion was the deeper level of trust that many Latinos hold for Spanish-language media over other sources. By providing information in Spanish that is culturally and linguistically relevant while addressing issues of importance to Latinos, Spanish-language media can help ensure that Latino voters have the information they need to make informed decisions and meaningfully engage in the political process.
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International Investigators Hear From People Who Have Experienced Homelessness
On March 1, the Spatial Justice Community Collaborative class under the direction of UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy joined with the Promise Institute for Human Rights to host the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Soledad García Muñoz, special rapporteur on economic, social, cultural and environmental rights. During a presentation that built on research by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, six presenters affiliated with the class talked about their lived experiences, including the time some had spent living in homeless encampments such as one at Echo Park Lake that had been forcibly cleared by law enforcement two years earlier. García Muñoz and her colleagues, Daniel Norona and Paul Mora, then asked questions and spoke about the importance of such interactions to their mission to investigate allegations of human rights throughout the Americas. García Muñoz also viewed an altar that was built by the class to honor the large number of preventable deaths of unhoused residents in Los Angeles. And she engaged in conversation with panelists such as Jennifer Blake, whose artwork focuses on uplifting people like herself who have experienced homelessness.
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