It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Researchers link firearm dealer openings to increases in local shootings
Opening new gun stores may raise neighborhood shooting rates for years, highlighting how firearm availability affects community violence, according to Rutgers researchers.
When a federally licensed firearm dealer opens in a neighborhood, local shootings tend to increase — and those higher rates last over time, according to a Rutgers-led study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Led by Daniel Semenza, an associate professor at Rutgers University-Camden and director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, researchers examined how the opening and closing of federally licensed firearm dealers impact local shooting rates in United States neighborhoods over time.
“When new federally licensed firearm dealers open in neighborhoods, our results show that local shootings increase and stay high for years,” Semenza said. “Dealer openings are not just a business issue. They influence public safety by increasing access to guns in communities.”
Researchers analyzed data from more than 20,000 neighborhoods across the 100 largest U.S. cities from 2015 to 2022, linking annual counts of shootings with records of firearm dealer openings and closures. The researchers said the findings suggest the presence and regulation of firearm dealers have measurable effects on neighborhood safety.
Neighborhoods with a new firearm dealer opening experienced significant increases in shootings after two to three years. A dealer opening in a neighborhood that previously had no dealers was associated with a 7.5% increase in the rate of total shootings two years later and a 13.3% increase in the rate of total shootings three years later.
This suggests dealer openings are a critical factor driving neighborhood-level gun violence, with effects lasting over time, the researchers said.
Closing dealers alone is unlikely to reduce violence – the guns they sold remain in circulation – without broader efforts to limit supply and improve oversight, with efforts like closing illegal secondary markets.
The Influence of Firearm Dealer Openings and Closings on Local Shootings in the U.S.
Article Publication Date
10-Oct-2025
Project unearths voices from one of the world’s first HIV/AIDS service organizations
Students and researchers at Binghamton University's Human Sexualities Lab interviewed 120 people, assembled an archive and bridged a generational divide
Sometimes you discover history in a garage, stored in dusty boxes, or in memories that go unspoken for decades. Often, it falls to the next generation — curious and respectful — to do the necessary work of sifting, sorting and asking questions.
A groundbreaking project spearheaded by Binghamton University, State University of New York's Human Sexualities Research Lab did more than add to the history of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the world’s first major HIV/AIDS service organization. It also breached a generational divide and pioneered new ways to conduct oral history.
“It ended up being probably the most transformative experience of my professional and personal life so far,” said Casey Adrian ’22, MSW ’24, the first author of two publications connected with the project. “As a queer person, it totally transformed the way I think about the community that I’m a part of.”
Co-authored by Binghamton University Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Sean Massey, Western Carolina University Assistant Professor of History Julia Haager MA ’15, PhD ’22, and Weill Cornell Medicine Associate Professor of Social Work Sarah Young, “‘You Folks Are the Ones That Are Going to Carry On’: Conducting Cross-Generational Oral Histories About the HIV/AIDS Crisis” recently appeared in The Oral History Review. A second article, co-authored by Adrian, Massey, Haager, and Eden Lowinger ’23, MSW ’25, is forthcoming in theAmerican Journal of Public Health.
For the project, a team of mostly undergraduates — led by Massey and Haager— interviewed 120 former GMHC volunteers, gaining insight into the organization’s work at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Formed in 1982 by five gay men in playwright Larry Kramer’s New York City apartment, the organization provided care, advocacy and support to a community that was largely feared and shunned.
“The government wasn’t doing anything, and health and social services weren’t prepared to deal with this,” said Massey, who volunteered with GMHC with his husband during the period. “People were being kicked out of their families and their apartments, disowned, fired from their jobs, and nobody was helping.”
As the epidemic expanded, so did the diversity of people affected by it. Once seen as a disease that solely affected gay, white men — the reality is far more complex — HIV was increasingly impacting heterosexuals, women, people of color, children and people who use or have used intravenous drugs. GMHC adapted to the shifting realities, but not without tension or struggle, Massey said.
A key component of the organization’s work was its buddy teams, which functioned as case managers, homecare attendants, advocates and confidants to individuals with HIV. Overall, the organization’s volunteers weren’t social workers or public health professionals, but queer people and their allies responding to an emerging crisis in their community, Adrian reflected.
“They did powerful, innovative and unprecedented things. They created materials that promoted sexual health, and were destigmatizing and celebrated queer identity,” Adrian said. “They created cutting-edge systems of peer care and peer support. They engaged in policy change and legal support for people facing discrimination — most of the time without a background in any sort of professional care or public health field.”
The process
Massey and his husband stayed involved with GMHC for a decade, first as volunteers and then as employees, until their life and work took them away from the Big Apple. Around five years ago, they discovered boxes of GMHC documents and informational materials while clearing out their garage.
“I knew we couldn’t throw that stuff away,” Massey said.
He discovered that GMHC had donated their administrative files to the New York Public Library in the mid-90s and reached out. Perusing the GMHC archives sparked another idea: writing a history of those transformational years at the organization, which saw the expansion of its mission to a broader public.
A social psychologist, Massey reached out to the History Department for expertise. The department connected him with Haager, whose research focuses on 20th century public health and eugenics.
Reviewing the documents in the lab, Haager suggested interviewing the people named in them, if they were still available. Together, they laid the groundwork for the oral history project, drawing in undergraduate students from the Human Sexualities Lab.
The interviews, conducted on Zoom, took place during the pandemic, and subjects were sent the questions ahead of time. The number of interviews snowballed — a dozen became 80, then 90 and eventually around 120. Typical oral history projects, on the other hand, involve maybe 40 interviews at most, said Haager, now an assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University.
“We broke rules that needed to be broken,” Haager said.
A typical oral history project is conducted one-on-one, although a historian may interview a group of subjects at one time. In the GMHC project, the dynamic was reversed with a group of interviewers — mostly undergraduates — talking with a single subject. This worked surprisingly well, likely because of the intergenerational nature of the connection.
Behind the scenes, the senior researchers used Google Chat to guide the student team during the interviews, instilling confidence, remembered Young, a former faculty member in the Human Sexualities Lab.
“This was a unique model that people could learn from in terms of how to conduct these kinds of interviews, and also how to train emerging scholars,” Young said.
Unlike traditional historians, the interview teams took time to process the emotional weight of what they heard, preserving their own well-being so they could be fully present for their subjects. Collaboration and self-care are strategies that historians may do well to adopt, Haager reflected.
“People were sharing things and saying to us over and over again: ‘I haven’t talked about this in 30 years. Thank you for giving me a place to talk about it,’” Haager recounted.
“They were great storytellers,” Massey added. “The story wasn’t just about loss, but about meaning: how they got through it, how important the work was and what they learned from it.”
Students were also involved in compiling material history. It turns out that many of the interview subjects, like Massey, had boxes of GMHC material in their homes. Boxes soon lined the wall of Massey’s office with meeting minutes, safer-sex pamphlets, training resources, newsletters, magazines, buttons, t-shirts and more.
Undergraduates central to both the oral history project and the cataloguing work include Adrian, Lowinger, Sarah Morea ’22, Dan Pergel ’23 and Claire Goldstein ’24.
GMHC had donated their administrative files to the New York Public Library in the mid-90s; the library agreed to add these additional materials to their collection, along with the recorded video interviews with former GMHC staff and volunteers. The collection is now being catalogued and should be open to the public by the spring.
As a social worker with a background in community organizing, Young was struck by the solidarity shown by the gay community of that time.
“There’s a metaphor of building a bike while riding it. It’s a perfect metaphor for this project because these were people whose partners, friends, lovers and community members were dying a terrible death. In the face of that, how do we try to make lives better for people?” Young said. “The archive speaks to that.”
The impact
A refrain emerged, repeated across each interview: working at GMHC was “the most important thing I ever did.” Massey and Adrian are turning the project into a book, and that phrase is the working title.
“They were young when they did this work, in their 20s and 30s,” Massey said. “They all left at different times for different reasons, but to a person, what they ended up doing in their lives was undeniably tied to this experience they had in their youth working for this organization.
Some went into social work or public health; others drew on their fundraising or graphic design experience at GMHC to pursue careers in those areas. Massey’s own career trajectory and outlook were shaped by his experience there, he acknowledged.
Through the oral history project, GMHC is still shaping careers. The project gave Haager the opportunity to explore the ways in which she approaches her discipline, and she has since shifted her focus to digital public history, she said.
A Women, Gender and Sexuality major as an undergrad, Adrian’s involvement in the project led him to complete his master’s in social work. Today, he is the assistant director of the Program for Research on Youth Development and Engagement (PRYDE) at Cornell University’s Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.
“I want to be part of a generation that eliminates the HIV epidemic,” he explained. “Hearing these stories shaped that desire. I feel very fortunate to be part of a generation of queer people who aren’t living through this kind of crisis, and I want to honor the people who responded to this horrible health emergency by being part of the change.”
The project also played an important role in bridging generational divides. Even LGBTQ students are unaware of the AIDS epidemic’s history and its impact on the gay community, Massey said.
Older generations of queer people may see the younger generation as standoffish or uninterested in this history, while younger people may see the older generation as no longer relevant, Adrian reflected. This tension sometimes came up implicitly in the interview space; conversation helped dispel it.
“It’s a lesson for my generation and future generations of queer people: How our community is able to stand up and say no when we’re faced with oppression and health disparities,” Adrian said. “How queer people can rally around each other and promote their own health and well-being.”
Binghamton University student Claire Goldstein '24 catalogs materials associated with Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the world’s first major HIV/AIDS service organization.
Binghamton University students Eden Lowinger ’23, MSW ’25 and Casey Adrian ’22, MSW ’24 (right) catalog materials associated with Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the world’s first major HIV/AIDS service organization.
“You Folks Are the Ones That Are Going to Carry On”: Conducting Cross-Generational Oral Histories About the HIV/AIDS Crisis
Locking carbon in trees and soils could help ‘stabilize climate for centuries’ – but only if combined with underground storage
University of Cambridge
New study on a ‘portfolio approach’ to carbon removal enables firms to mix expensive tech-based solutions that inject carbon deep underground with lower-cost and currently more available nature-based options.
The research can identify which corporate portfolios could best stabilise global temperatures over centuries and suggests that, with the right ‘buffer’, even those projects at higher risk of carbon re-release – such as forests and biochar – could help towards this long-term goal.
However, portfolios must plan to be 100% geological storage by the mid-century date of net zero to be credible, say researchers.
A team of researchers, led by Cambridge University, has now formulated a method to assess whether carbon removal portfolios can help limit global warming over centuries. The approach also distinguishes between buying credits to offset risk versus claiming net-negative emissions.
The study paves the way for nature-based carbon removal projects – such as planting new forests or restoring existing ones – tobecome effective climate change solutions when balanced with a portfolio of other removal techniques, according to researchers.
They say the findings, published in the journal Joule, show how nature-based and technology-based carbon storage solutions can work together through the transition to net zero, challenging the notion that only permanent tech-based “geological storage” can effectively tackle climate change.
The study’s authors point out that some carbon removal portfolios, such as California’s forest carbon offsets programme, may be severely underfunded for risks beyond the next few decades.
They call for a “buffer” of around two tonnes of stored carbon for every tonne offset in portfolios containing nature-based solutions, noting that this is “sufficient in most cases” to manage long-term risks.
However, researchers say the most high-risk portfolios that rely heavily on nature-based offsetting might need extreme buffers of nine tonnes of carbon removed for every tonne emitted. The authors caution against the use of such portfolios given the costs and uncertainties involved.
“Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are collectively spending billions on carbon removal portfolios to offset their growing carbon footprints,” said lead author Dr Conor Hickey, Assistant Professor in Energy and Climate at Cambridge University’s Department of Land Economy.
“While companies and countries agree that increased investment in carbon removal is essential to reach net zero targets, they also want to understand whether carbon removal schemes can help stabilise global temperatures over the long term.”
“Our risk management approach offers one of the first reliable measures for portfolio managers targeting long-term temperature stabilisation,” said Hickey. “It shows that nature-based carbon storage such as tree planting has a bigger role to play than critics assume when used as part of a diversified carbon removal portfolio.”
“Durable net zero means geological net zero,” said Professor Myles Allen, a co-author on the paper and Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford. “To stabilise climate in line with Paris Agreement goals, anyone still relying on offsets must plan to shift entirely to carbon dioxide removal with geological storage by the middle of the century.”
Current market incentives favour cheaper and more available ‘biological’ projects to pull carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and store it, such as forestry, which locks carbon in trees, or biochar, where plant materials are heated to create a charcoal-like substance that traps carbon when incorporated into soil.
However, these methods carry a higher risk of carbon re-release, such as when land use changes or wildfires increase. They are often considered only a temporary solution – the carbon is not locked away for long enough to stem rising global temperatures.
Alternative tech-based solutions like Direct Air Capture (DAC) are proving hard to grow at scale when costs remain high and the process energy-intensive. Yet the permanence of the carbon storage means this emerging technology is less vulnerable to reversal, such as through leakage. DAC can be combined with deep underground storage to lock the CO₂ away.
For the latest study, the research team have developed a new “risk management framework” to accurately calculate the additional CO₂ removal needed to keep temperatures stable over centuries for various storage portfolios.
Their analysis shows that in some cases, such as a high-risk portfolio dominated by forestry projects, the extra amount of CO₂ removal needed to make up for this risk doesn’t change much – whether the timescale is 300 or even 1,000 years.
“Removing more carbon now can effectively cover carbon storage risk for centuries, and this can be done with a mix of nature and tech, as long as the right buffers are built in,” said Hickey.
“Portfolios can combine expensive permanent solutions like DAC with lower-cost nature-based options like planting trees – matching society's willingness to pay while still contributing to temperature stabilisation goals.”
“Our approach enables strategic carbon storage choices based on current availability, while targeting long-term temperature stabilisation. It provides buyer flexibility while valuing lower-risk storage options, something today's market lacks,” said Hickey.
By 2050, the UK aims to achieve net zero, with geological storage expected to play a major role in storing any ongoing CO₂ emissions. Incoming UK and EU guidance states that projects must be subject to a minimum 200-year permanence requirement.
The trunks and branches of trees in Australia's tropical rainforests – also known as woody biomass – have become a net source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, according to a new international study.
According to the team behind the Nature study, which includes experts from The Australian National University (ANU), Australia’s wet tropics are the first globally to show this response to climate change. The rising temperature, air dryness and droughts caused by human-driven climate change are likely the major culprits.
Usually, tropical forests absorb more carbon than they release – what's known as a carbon sink. Woody biomass plays a key role in this process, alongside forest canopies and soils.
But lead author Dr Hannah Carle, from Western Sydney University, said the capacity of woody biomass to continue working as a carbon sink is at risk.
"Tropical forests are among the most carbon-rich ecosystems on the planet. We rely on them more than most people realise," Dr Carle, who conducted this work as part of her PhD at ANU, said.
"Forests help to curb the worst effects of climate change by absorbing some of the carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels. But our work shows this is under threat.
"The change our study describes is largely due to increased tree mortality driven by climate change, including increasingly extreme temperatures, atmospheric dryness and drought.
“Regrettably, the associated increase in carbon losses to the atmosphere has not been offset by increased tree growth. This is surprising because higher carbon dioxide levels should make it easier for plants to scavenge carbon dioxide from the air, leading to more tree growth and greater carbon sink capacity.”
The findings have significant implications for emissions reduction targets, which are partly based on the estimated capacity of forests to continue to absorb emissions and help mitigate climate change.
"Current models may overestimate the capacity of tropical forests to help offset fossil fuel emissions," Dr Carle said.
"We also found that cyclones suppress the carbon sink capacity of woody biomass in these forests. This is cause for concern with cyclones projected to become increasingly severe under climate change, and to impact areas further south, affecting additional stretches of forest to a potentially greater extent.”
Co-author Professor Adrienne Nicotra from ANU added: “The rainforest sites at the heart of this research provide unusually long-term and high-resolution data on forest health through time. We need to pay attention to that data."
