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It might sound like the start of an off-color joke—if a man and a woman were each shot and killed in separate homicides, where is the most likely place they would be found?—but the answer to the question is anything but funny.

And for researchers like Jennifer Dineen, interim director of UConn's Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Violence Prevention, the riddle sadly isn't very difficult to explain.

"Men are more likely to be killed by a firearm in a homicide outside of their home by a peer, community member or someone they don't know," Dineen says. "Women, if they are going to die by firearm homicide, are more likely to have that happen in the home and at the hand of somebody they know."

Those differences require distinct policy responses, Dineen says, one designed to keep the community safe, the other to preserve safety inside the home.

But because men in the U.S. are killed by firearms at a higher rate than women and since they also own firearms at a higher rate, researchers and policymakers long have considered firearm violence and injury a male issue, she notes.

"When we focus on the male aspect of firearm injury and violence, we are missing significant parts of the problem, which we then are not addressing," Dineen says. "When we frame the problem as a male issue, many of the questions we ask about that problem have a male focus, and the solutions that we pursue often have a male focus.

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