FSU College of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Kleck's recent research on illegal gun markets has found that organized gun trafficking is largely irrelevant to the arming of America's criminals, and that high-volume trafficking is virtually nonexistent. Instead, gun theft is central to the channeling of guns into criminal hands. Other recent research has found that higher general gun ownership rates reduce homicide rates, probably because the violence-reducing effects of guns among noncriminal victims and prospective victims outweigh the violence-increasing effects of guns among criminals.

Gary Kleck

Professor
850-644-7651
gkleck@fsu.edu

Education

Ph.D. 1979, University of Illinois at Urbana; Sociology
M.A. 1975, University of Illinois at Urbana; Sociology
B.A. 1973, University of Illinois, with High Honors and with Distinction; Sociology

Courses Taught

• Survey Research
• Criminology
• Applied Statistics
• Regression
• Introduction to Research Methods
• Law Enforcement
• Research Methods in Criminology
• Violence Theory Seminar
• Crime Control
• Assessing Evidence
• Gun Control

Research Interests

• Gun control
• Deterrence
• Crime control
• Violence

Select Publications

• Kleck, Gary, Brion Sever, Spencer Li, and Marc Gertz. 2005. “The Missing Link in General Deterrence Research.” Criminology 43(3):623-659.
• Kleck, Gary and Jongyeon Tark. 2005. “Resisting Crime: The Effects of Victim Action on the Outcomes of Crimes.”  Criminology 42(4):861-909.
• Kleck, Gary and Theodore Chiricos. 2002. “Unemployment and Property Crime: a Target-Specific Assessment of Opportunity and Motivation as Mediating Factors.” Criminology 40(3):649-680.
• Kleck, Gary and Don B. Kates. Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control . N.Y.: Prometheus Books. Selected to Choice Current Reviews for Academic Libraries' 39th annual “Outstanding Academic Title List,” awarded for “excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to their field, and their value as an important treatment of their topic.”
• Kleck, Gary and Michael Hogan. 1999. “A National Case-control Study of Homicide Offending and Gun Ownership.” Social Problems 46(2):275-293.
• Kleck, Gary. 1997. Targeting Guns: Firearms and their Control .  Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter.
• Kleck, Gary and Don B. Kates, Jr. 1997. The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence . San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy.
• Kleck, Gary, Charles Crawford, and Ted Chiricos. 1996. “Defendant's Race and Sentencing as a Habitual Offender.”  Criminology 36(3):481-511.
• Kleck, Gary and Marc Gertz. 1995. “Armed Resistance to Crime: the Prevalence and Nature of Self-defense with a Gun.”  Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 86(1):150-187.
• Kleck, Gary. 1991. Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America .  Hawthorne, N.Y.:Aldine de Gruyter. Winner of the Michael J. Hindelang Award of the American Society of Criminology.

Grants

• Testing a Fundamental Assumption of Deterrence-Based Crime Control Policy, $80,590, awarded by the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation to study the link between actual and perceived punishment levels, 1997.

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