A curious article in Kaiser Health News (KHN) tries to explain why “even public health experts have limited insight into stopping gun violence in America.” KHN lays the blame on the National Rifle Association and a nearly 30-year old budget amendment that prevents the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from funding research promoting gun control. KHN goes on to say that despite the ban on using CDC funds to advocate for gun control, there is a cottage industry of academics who are working to reduce gun violence.
It is no secret that many strategies proposed today — from school metal detectors to enhanced policing, to the optimal timing and manner of safely storing guns, to restrictions on gun sales — have limited scientific ballast because of a lack of data.
What are the implications of constraining the CDC from funding left-leaning research into gun control? Would researchers have really found anything useful? Or would it have merely been federal funding for a political agenda they wanted paid to pursue? More from KHN:
Cunningham is one of a small group of like-minded researchers, from universities across the United States, who refused to let go of investigating a growing public health risk, and they pushed ahead without government funds.
The following is their reasoning:
Imagine if cancer research had been halted in 1996 — many tumors that are now eminently treatable might still be lethal. “It’s like cancer,” said Rebecca Cunningham, vice president for research at the University of Michigan, an academic who has kept the thread of gun research going all these years. “There may be 50 kinds of cancer, and there are preventions for all of them. Firearm violence has many different routes, and it will require different kinds of science and approaches.”
Criminals who perpetrate gun violence have nothing in common with cancer. Neither does a disease model fit firearm use or misuse. The founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control was Mark Rosenberg. Despite the ban he was able to facilitate research funding on gun violence until he was forced out of his position in 1999. More about Rosenberg from KHN:
Rosenberg thought then that gun violence could go the way of car crashes. The federal government spent $200 million a year on research to redesign roadways and cars beginning in the 1970s, he said, and had seen death rates plummeted.
Here is the fallacy in this line of thinking. Car crashes and auto accident deaths are a problem that could be solved using engineering. Let me describe the methods authorities used to reduce car crash deaths. Automakers had to reengineer cars to crumple on impact, absorbing the energy of crashes. Seatbelts were mandated and cars equipped with airbags. Roadway shoulders were cleared of obstacles that could be impacted by cars and were widened where possible. Narrow roads were widened, curves straightened, and embankments smoothed. The legal age for drinking was raised across states to 21 and drunk drivers were dealt with more harshly. Drivers’ education has improved and is now outcomes based rather than a mere time requirement.
Very few of the steps mentioned above apply to gun deaths, which are not an engineering exercise. They are a cultural, behavioral, and socioeconomic phenomenon, mostly related to criminal activity. The notion that gun violence is a public health threat rather than a criminal activity is controversial.
A study published in 1993 concluded that “guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide,” a finding on risk factors that prompted an uproar in conservative political circles.
The 1993 article is controversial partly because it appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine rather than a criminal justice or social science journal. The finding was that guns are more likely to be used to harm people in the home rather than protect them from intruders. Buried in the fine print is that illicit drug use, criminal history and physical violence often precedes gun violence in the home.
Perhaps conservatives would have more faith in research into gun violence if it was performed in university schools of criminal justice, community policing and crime prevention rather than schools of public health. The former target the crime, while the latter blames the gun. Gun violence does not follow a biological disease model, nor it is an engineering exercise.