Studies are ‘decades behind,’ owing to a lack of funding, but research is picking up
About 40% of the world’s civilian-owned firearms are in the United States, a country that has had some 1.4 million gun deaths in the past four decades. And yet, until recently, there has been almost no federal funding for research that could inform gun policy.
The reason, Crifasi says, is mid-1990s legislation that restricted federal funding for gun-violence research and was backed by the US gun lobby — organizations led by the National Rifle Association that aim to influence policy on firearms.
Gun-violence research is also stymied by gaps in basic data. For example, information on firearm ownership hasn’t been collected by the US government since the mid-2000s, a result of the Tiahrt Amendments. These provisions to a 2003 appropriations bill prohibit the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from releasing firearm-tracing data. For researchers, this means not knowing the total number of guns in any scenario they might be studying.
Another complicating factor is that primary sources of gun-violence data — hospitals and police departments — issue statistics that are incomplete and incompatible. Hospitals frequently report intentional gunshot injuries as accidents. “Folks in the ER are not criminal investigators, and they default to saying things are accidents unless they absolutely know for certain that it was an intentional shooting,” Roman says.
Still, these successes might not translate to the United States. “Could America do what Australia did? The answer is no, not a chance. You’ve got too many guns [in the US],” Alpers says. “You have to separate America from the rest of the world.” And, with the prospect of tightened regulation on the horizon, US firearm ownership seems to be rising: gun stores around the country are seeing increased sales.
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