To Shoot or Not to Shoot? Modeling Incentives of Agents in Gun-Free Zones

This is a work on the topic of gun-free zones and its influence on social welfare and public safety. There game-theoretical approach is taken to model the interaction between the law-abiding citizen inside the institution (referred as Student) and potential shooter (referred as Criminal) under both shall-carry laws and fun-free zone implementation on campus, with Social Planer to decide on which option to choose between this two based on social welfare. The results showed the probability of attack on Students inside the institutional zone to increase with the shift from shall-carry laws to gun-free zone. Social welfare is decreasing with this shift, as losses of Student and people related to him outweigh whatever utility Criminal receives from what she committed. Policies affecting the Criminals costs in case of an armed attack are found to be the best to be chosen to both decrease the probability of an attack and increase social welfare, while the ones targeting availability of firearms in general seem to produce the opposite effect.