Protective and Risk Factors

Protective and Risk factors are conditions that are associated with an increased or decreased risk of a health outcome. Public health recognizes that disease and other health events do not occur randomly in a population. They are more likely to occur in some members of the population than others because risk factors are not distributed randomly in the population. As a public health problem, firearm violence is also not random. Firearm violence encompasses several issues, and while firearms are typically the vector by which injury or crime is committed, the root causes of violence are complex and varied.