Professors at two Colorado universities have completed a book featuring interviews with 67 state prisoners, all of whom committed crimes that involved guns. In "Guns, Violence, and Criminal Behavior: The Offender's Perspective," the criminals tell the professors that guns give them power in the world of street violence, providing an "often-overlooked" view on the factors that lead to shootings, writes The Denver Post [2]. "It's an explanation really of what happened before, during and after the crime has been committed," says Mark Pogrebin, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, who was joined by CU-Denver colleague Paul Stretesky and Colorado State University professor Prabha Unnithan. "Some of the participants told us about carrying guns in social situations--after work, at a party and so on--but a common thread that was repeated was the notion of a street code in which many of the felons believed that carrying guns was necessary for going out," Pogrebin adds in this press release [3], which points out that laws both limiting or expanding access to guns would have little impact on criminal behavior. [4] Westword [4] looks at the interviews, including one with a 28-year-old man named Zack who discusses shooting a man in the stomach: "I was gonna fight him, but I had a gun. Why fight, you know, when you have a gun?" In this month's edition of 5280 [5], meanwhile, Eli Gottlieb explores Colorado's "gun-happy landscape."