The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is an international prize awarded by the Foundation for the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. The winners are selected by an independent international jury led by Professors Lawrence Sherman and Jerzy Sarnecki.

The research carried out by this year's winners has significantly improved the ability to combat firearms-related violence around the around the world. For over five decades, the laureates' evidence-based research has has highlighted the positive effects of restrictive gun laws, thereby stimulated important policy initiatives to curb violence caused by firearms.

This year's winners have developed important methods to demonstrate and understand the crucial role of access to firearms in relation to the number of deaths. They have been able to convincingly refute the claim that firearm availability does not affect the volume of injuries.

About the winners

Franklin E. Zimring, William G. Simon Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. In the mid-1960s, Zimring and his colleagues proved that violence with different types of weapons resulted in different numbers of deaths per attack. His research research also found that homicide rates had more to do with the availability of firearms than with crime trends. In his book 'Crime is Not the Problem', he showed, for example, that violent crime was higher in England than in the US, but that the number of deaths from violent attacks was much higher in the US - which has a significantly higher number of firearms in private hands.

Philip J. Cook, ITT/Terry Sanford Professor Emeritus of Public Policy Studies and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Economics, Duke University, Durham, USA. In the 1970s, Cook began work comparing differences in the availability of firearms in the 50 US states. He was able to show that the number of firearm-related suicides was strongly correlated with the availability of firearms in each state. He then created a model that could predict the number of firearm-related deaths in relation to the number of firearms in a given location. The model is now used to study a range of phenomena, including the risk of police shooting someone to death.