By Grace Wade
People outside the US Capitol are protesting against gun violence.
The images are courtesy of Ting Shen/Bloomberg.
Andrew Morral leads the Gun Policy in America initiative. He tells New Scientist how difficult it is to conduct gun violence research in the US, how that is starting to change, and what the latest evidence shows about the impact of everything from background checks and safe storage laws to assault weapon bans.
The Gun Policy in America initiative reviews the effects of gun laws on outcomes including suicides, homicides, and mass shootings, as well as defensive gun use participation, hunting and sport shooting.
Child access prevention laws, or safe storage laws, have the strongest evidence of reducing firearm suicides and injuries among young people. There is good evidence that they reduce firearms casualties.
Most states don't have child access prevention laws. Most people who buy firearms are buying them for protection. They feel like they won't be able to access their gun in an emergency if they locked it up.
It is one of the reasons safe storage laws don't pass in many states. We don't have good research on defensive gun use, so we can evaluate this trade-off.
We have good evidence that stand your ground laws have a harmful effect. There have been increases in firearm homicides.
The nation has swept these laws in the last decade or two. If you could retreat from a conflict safely, you were not allowed to use deadly force. Stand your ground laws relieve people of their duty to retreat.
Our second highest rating is that the kind of background checks the federal government requires will decrease firearm homicides.
They only apply to the sale of firearms from gun dealers. Many states do not require background checks for firearms transactions between private parties.
Universal background checks for all sales have been called for. There isn't a lot of research on that yet, but these very well may improve upon ones only with dealers.
They apply to people who appear to present a risk to themselves or others. A family member, law enforcement or a mental health professional can make a petition for a red flag order.
A judge decides if that person should be allowed to have a gun. In some cases, the laws are only 16 days. It is an emergency measure and not a permanent injunction.
We don't have studies that make an open-and-shut case that they're effective because they haven't been around long enough to get that kind of evidence.
The study by Garen Wintemute at the University of California, Davis looked at whether these laws could reduce mass shootings. There were 21 case studies where red flag orders were used. It looks like they might have some benefits. The studies that we would classify as providing strong causality evidence haven't been done yet.
We don't have strong evidence, but it's hard to study. It is a very noisy time series and mass shootings are very rare. There have been studies, but they didn't stand a chance of showing anything from the beginning.
I think they could have an effect on mass shootings, or at least the number of casualties.
One thing that seems clear is that people with serious mental health conditions are more likely to be victims of violence.
It's almost exclusively men who kill a lot of people, so you could argue that a better indicator is being a man.
The Gun Policy in America initiative provided a graphic showing thicker lines indicating more substantial evidence for the effect of gun policies.
There is a person named RAND.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted research on gun violence prevention. Some people thought it was advocating for gun control.
The CDC didn't see it that way, but Congress passed an amendment in 1996 that said advocacy research couldn't be done on this topic. The amount of funding withdrawn from the CDC was equivalent to how much it had spent on firearms violence prevention. In 2012 the restrictions were expanded to include the National Institutes of Health.
The federal government did not support research on firearms violence for almost a quarter of a century.
A study has shown that, compared to what you would expect to see in federal funding, just 1.6 per cent was spent on firearms violence.
Congress appropriated funds for research on firearms violence after clarifying the intent of the Dickey Amendment.
The idea of using the Dickey Amendment as a guard rail was first suggested to me by the director of the CDC, and I took some personal credit for making the case to the committee at the appropriations hearing. The appropriation was supported by the committee.
Three years have passed since the first funding went out in 2020, and the moderately small programme is still going strong.
Even though the federal government wasn't supporting it, there was some good research going on.
The federal government wasn't collecting the kind of data needed to do a lot of this work. The CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System has been fully funded by the government. That is a big change and a positive one.
Things are moving in a different direction. We lost a time series because the FBI stopped reporting uniform crime data.
It's expensive for researchers to get their hands on the data that the government collects on firearm injuries that result in hospitalisations or emergency room treatment.
The Tiahrt Amendment made it so that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives couldn't share gun trace data in the way that it had been, and that closed off a lot of important research. That is still in effect.
A lot of projects have started up because of an influx of both private and federal dollars. The National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research has given almost $22 million in funding to more than 44 projects.
Between the CDC and the NIH, the federal government has funded about 45 or 50 projects.
It is a time of growth in this field. A lot of people want to understand the problem and find solutions.
Guns are one of the most polarising policy questions. A lot of people have opinions. They are not particularly open to new evidence and that is a real problem for both sides of the debate.
I think there is a middle ground in the country of people who want solutions and are open to new information, research and evidence. My hope is that the middle group will be large enough to convince good policy options to move the needle toward better prevention.
The interview was edited for continuity and length.
You can get a round-up of all the health and fitness news every Saturday by signing up for the Health Check newsletter.
There are more on these topics.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
