There’s an Awful Lot We Still Don’t Know About Guns

It's a measure of the divisiveness of guns in the United States that federal public health officials barely spend any money funding gun violence research.

Because of the deaths of students and teachers in Parkland, Fla., last month, there's a chance this will change.

When someone dies in a car crash, the local police fill out a detailed form that is shared with the federal government. Researchers have mined that data to see how policies — in road design, licensing rules, seatbelt laws or car requirements — can reduce the death toll from driving.

When someone is killed in a shooting, the data collected is skimpier, more haphazard and not reported to the federal government from every state. That lack of information isn’t the main reason gun policy remains such a political and controversial issue in American life. But it does limit the ability of policymakers to fully understand what laws could make a difference.

Over all, the federal government spends far, far less on research into gun violence than it does on other health risks that kill a comparable number of Americans each year. As a result, gun deaths are the subject of substantially less scholarship.

But after decades of meager funding from federal officials, Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, testified in February that the department should invest in gun violence research — and his priorities could shape the spending agenda. The possible repeal of legislative language barring certain officials from using money to “advocate or promote gun control” came up several times during this week’s roundtable discussion between President Trump and members of Congress on possible new gun legislation.

Scholars at the nonpartisan RAND corporation recently surveyed the current evidence about gun safety and violence. After a two-year study, they published their results Friday, with a big review of the literature and a set of research recommendations. One of their biggest conclusions was that we don’t have very good evidence on many gun safety questions at all. “There has been fairly little research compared to other causes of mortality,” said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, who was the lead author on the survey. “A lot of the research that has been done has been fairly ambiguous, so both sides can pick it apart fairly easily.”

The RAND team went through all the published research on the effects of gun policies and found relatively few studies that it found persuasive. It took those studies and plotted them on a table of major questions the country might want to know about gun violence prevention. Lots of areas remain unstudied.

If government support for research opened up, what should researchers study? We asked 29 experts on guns — trained in criminology, economics and public health — for their proposed research priorities. Eighteen responded, sharing a range of suggestions about the most important unanswered questions about guns that they’d like to see explored.

Learn more at the NYT