Six months ago today, the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting left us with endless questions about gun violence.
Some may never be answered. But in response to the call by President Obama to tackle the high rates of gun deaths in our country, the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council this month laid out a series of research questions that need answering in the next three to five years.
This agenda may be the only tangible policy impact of the schoolhouse massacre, after the failure of Congress to take any significant action. The study, called Firearm-Related Violence, calls on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to look into issues ranging from new safety technologies to the links between gun violence and racial and income inequality.
Alan Leshner, who headed its committee of experts, says it’s time to approach gun violence as a public health issue. And while mass shootings such as Newtown grab the most headlines, our research priorities lie elsewhere.
Q. Does viewing gun violence as a public health emergency change the way we deal with it?
A. Some of it is a mind-set. You can view it as just a public safety issue, but when you look at it as both a public safety and a public health issue, then you increase the focus on injury, on death. A good analogy would be the regulations surrounding cars and driving, or tobacco use. As seat belts were introduced, injuries and deaths declined dramatically. And understanding the health consequences of tobacco use changed advertising and regulation for how it’s sold in stores.
Q. How do we apply that to guns?
A. We’d look, for example, at technologies that make it more difficult for guns to be fired accidentally. Or at developing biologically based identifiers — like fingerprints or retina scanners — so if someone who isn’t the true owner of the firearm got possession of it, the gun wouldn’t work. Or whether video games lead to an increase in real-life violence. We have no idea if that’s true.
The problem is that way too many of the approaches being discussed today are based on intuition, common sense or ideology. We want to provide a science base to help people make rational, informed decisions.
Q. In what areas do we need better data on guns?
A. There are so many. Simple questions are: What kinds of factors determine whether juveniles have access to firearms? How do they acquire them? What types of weapons do they try to get? We still don’t even know how many guns there are in the United States. And what’s the degree to which background checks at the point of sale are actually effective? Do disqualified people just buy their guns illegally?
Q. Your report says the biggest source of gun deaths in the U.S. is suicide. The fatality rate from car crashes has dropped by about a third over the last two decades. Could we do the same for suicides?
A. Yes. But we’d need to know whether making guns unavailable to suicidal-prone individuals, however you would determine that, would in fact reduce suicides. Or would these people just find another way to do it?
Q. How would having a database on gun ownership be helpful for this research?
A. It would help set priorities. We’d want to know how many guns are out there, what kind, how are they used and kept. This does not mean an individual gun registry. In science, we have techniques for protecting the confidentiality of individuals.
All we’re interested in is the aggregated data. It’s used very well in genetics research. Nobody wants their genetic information freely available, but because we have these techniques, we can protect confidentiality. Why couldn’t we do the same thing with firearms?
Q. Does the CDC have enough money to do the research you recommend?
A. No, they don’t. But the president’s budget does have $10 million in it that could get them started. We hope that other agencies, private foundations and donors would find this an interesting and important topic to pursue.
Q. Did your report look at mass shootings?
A. Yes, but it was lower on the list. Mass shootings are rare. So from a public health perspective, it’s a relatively smaller issue. There are 105,000 deaths and injuries from firearms in a year. I don’t know the exact number for mass violence, but it’s way below that.
That doesn’t make this an unimportant issue. But suicides was tops. Next on our list was gun use in the course of committing a crime, and after that, accidental gun injuries. We don’t have very good statistics about any of that.
Q. Sounds like the problem of gun violence is very different from the public’s imagination of it.
A. Mass shootings get the most attention. But we’ve got to focus on where the greatest numbers of deaths exist.