Research Symposium

BIO

Nice to meet you! My name is Nashely Gabriel Cardenas, an undergraduate student at Florida State University pursuing a bachelor in Accounting with a minor in Criminology. My graduation journey has been accelerated through Degree in Three with hopes of entering the workforce and getting my CPA licensure. My passions include uncovering financial irregularities, preventing fraud, and maintaining financial integrity within different fields. I am currently involved with the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program where I learned the importance of organization, problem-solving, and field work. Other organizations I take proud of being a member of are Women in Accounting, Unconquered Scholars, and a dance team Next Level Noles. I'm always eager to network with professionals with hands-on experience in fraud outreach, litigation assistance, and forensic accounting.

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: RPO Laws, Criminology, Firearms