Research Symposium

BIO

I was born and raised in Tallahassee, FL and am proud to be a First Generation student at FSU. I am currently completing an Honors Thesis in Far Right European Parties, in addition to my wonderful work with Dr. Emma Fridel on Risk Protection Orders in Florida. I am also currently working on my Research Intensive Baccalaureate Certificate, where we are working on a research project concerning affective polarization in US politics. In addition to my research commitments I am a Legislative Intern at The Florida Capitol and I intern for an immigration law firm in Tallahassee. I am looking forward to working on Capitol Hill this summer with the office of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson. Upon graduation I plan to go to law school and work to become a Civil Rights Attorney. I hope my work will also bring me on the policy side of some of the core issues that drive my career, especially in the areas of criminal justice and human rights.

A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of the Impacts and Implementation of Florida’s Risk Protection Order (RPO) Law

Abstract

The goal of this project is to explore the efficacy and implementation of Risk Protection Orders (RPOs) in Florida. RPOs were introduced in the Florida Legislature in 2018 and since their inception very few studies have been conducted on them. It is important that we investigate the implementation of RPOs on a larger scale to determine whether they are an efficient mechanism to reduce gun violence. The three stages to this analysis are: collecting the data from over 15,000 RPO cases from Florida to create a database, running four levels of quantitative analysis to evaluate the effect of RPOs on reducing gun violence and using mixed methods to explore the differences in RPO implementation across jurisdictions. Although the project is in its first stages, it promises to strengthen and broaden the knowledge on RPOs and their relation to gun violence exponentially. The database created will be the largest and most representative sample of RPOs and will allow for the most comprehensive evaluation of a state’s RPO laws. The findings generated by the analyses will reveal important trends of the implementation and efficiency of RPOs in preventing gun violence, an ongoing issue that has affected millions of lives. Researching the efficacy of the legislation that is created to reduce gun violence will allow future legislators to create new and better solutions.

Keywords: Gun, Firearm, Risk Protection Orders, Gun Control