In 2017, a committee of emergency medicine physicians set out their own firearms research agenda. It’s extensive, so I won’t list every question, but the known unknowns include: How is gun violence prevention different from other kinds of violence prevention? What kind of data reporting would help? What is the epidemiology of firearm suicide? Does social media make assault with guns worse? Do certain locations attract gun violence, like bars, or parks? What are the signs in someone about to commit mass gun violence? What kinds of security and infrastructure prevent a mass shooting? What kinds of characteristics, like buying guns or high-capacity magazines, correlate with mass shootings? These seem like good things to know.
In 2018, an editorial in the International Journal of Epidemiology proposed that epidemiologists, too, could play an important role in reducing gun violence in the US, if they could simply get at the data. After all, the authors pointed out, just owning a gun is strongly associated with injury and death by firearm—suicide, homicide, and accident. The US, the editorial goes on to say, had the highest number of firearm homicides of any wealthy nation in 2015—ten times the number of the next four countries on the list combined. Why? Dunno. No data. Congress, lobbied by the NRA, has frozen all funding for further research....
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the 1996 NRA-freeze didn’t put an end to gun violence work completely. It continued. And it learned a few things since.... So as the public policy researcher Philip Cook says in a 2018 review of firearms control policy and history in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, it is indeed still possible to know facts about guns and how to reduce their violent use.
For one thing: Guns are more deadly than other weapons. “Duh,” you are thinking, but consider why that’s important. In crimes of passion, or inebriation, the choice of weapon is secondary to intent. If someone impulsively determines to commit violence, the relative deadliness of their weapon of convenience matters—to the outcome and to the legal response. So it makes sense to try to reduce gun access in general.
For two: The same goes for assault and suicide. If people have access to guns, they’re more likely to use them when they attempt to harm others or themselves. One survey of inmates in state prisons who’d used guns in their crimes asked where they’d gotten them; barely one in 10 had bought their own. The rest had begged, borrowed, or stolen them. If they hadn’t been able to get a gun, they wouldn’t have used it in the crime.
And here’s a really cool part. Three specific policies, when implemented in states, reduced gun homicide rates. Simple moves here showed marked decreases: Restricting the right to carry a concealed weapon, implementing waiting periods on the purchase of firearms (a “cooling-off period”), and denying gun ownership to people convicted of domestic violence. People who are violent to partners or family members often go on to be violent to strangers.
In fact, a domestic-violence ban and background checks that take mental health into account have seen bipartisan support in the past, even in the face of NRA lobbying...
What’s important here, though, is that this presidential administration has consistently treated science and data as a nuisance, as something to ignore or mischaracterize in pursuit of policies that serve corporate or cultural interests. It’s an approach with murderous outcomes. As is the case with climate change, with vaccines, and—despite Texas Senator John Cornyn’s tweet to the contrary—homelessness and gun violence, scientists have been presenting policymakers with viable solutions for years. But the problem hasn’t budged. It’s big. It’s squishy. It’s just about politics, not facts."
How to Reduce Gun Violence: Ask Some Scientists | WIRED
