Stephen P. Teret was just starting out as a law student in Manhattan, more than 40 years ago, when he got a real-life lesson in the hidden complexities of gun policy.
To help the district attorney’s office, the young Mr. Teret was asked to review the police-arrest reports stacking up in an overburdened courthouse and decide if each of the alleged crimes should be prosecuted as a felony—meaning a potential loss of gun-ownership rights—or moved along quickly as a misdemeanor.
“I don’t even remember if I had taken criminal law,” said Mr. Teret, now a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins University. “It was an exciting job to have, but I was making social-policy decisions that would affect the safety of other people, in very real ways.”
In the aftermath of the elementary-school killings in Newtown, Conn., the Obama administration is making a new push for government support for gun-policy researchers like Mr. Teret, hoping to reverse longstanding restrictions championed by the gun industry. In particular, President Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to resume studies of gun-related violence, and asked Congress to approve $10-million for such work.
After many years without much study, and with contradictions in the existing body of work, a long list of unanswered questions awaits policy makers. Where do criminals get their guns? Does magazine size matter? Do right-to-carry laws make communities safer? Do gun locks help? What’s the effect, if any, of violent video games? And many, many more.
“Any area you talk about in guns, you scratch the surface and we don’t know,” said David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “Or we know a tiny bit.”
For gun-industry lobbyists, that may be enough knowledge. They persuaded Congress to largely squelch research over the past 20 years, after studies began to show significant net health risks associated with the widespread ownership of firearms in the United States.
Yet if the Obama administration succeeds in sparking a new round of studies, it may not lead to the avalanche of data-based rationales for gun control that some partisans may be expecting. University researchers uniformly acknowledge that even if guns are convincingly shown to be causes of injury and death more often than protectors of life and liberty, they will remain legal in the United States.
As such, researchers are awaiting the resumption of government money with plans for future studies that largely focus on the specific ways in which the nation’s 32,000 annual gun-related fatalities play out, through which they hope to identify discrete changes that could reduce that number.
“No one is talking about banning guns,” said Frederick P. Rivara, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, and one of several authors of a 1993 study that led Congress to ban gun-related research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We’re just trying to figure out what works to decrease the toll from guns.”
Shooting Ourselves
Mr. Rivara’s 1993 study found that a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be used in the death of a household member than in self-defense. That helped poke a hole in a central tenet of the gun industry’s rationale for gun ownership.
The lobbying offense was fierce. As a result, Congress first prohibited the CDC from financing research that “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” It later approved a measure in 2003 that put sharp limits on the sharing of police records used to trace guns involved in crimes, including a ban on their use by researchers.
The government never devoted large amounts to gun-violence studies. The CDC was spending only $2.6-million on such research, out of a $43-million agency budget, when Congress acted against it in 1996. And the National Institutes of Health has awarded a total of three research grants to study gun violence since 1973, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Private philanthropy has also been limited. The leader has been the Joyce Foundation, which distributes about $3-million a year for studies of gun violence.
But the tide began turning after a series of mass shootings in recent years, the latest being the slaughter in December of 20 children and six staff members at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Mr. Obama responded last month with a package of 23 actions and recommendations, including an order that the CDC finance research into the causes and prevention of gun violence. He also pushed plans for collecting and sharing more data on gun crimes, and for studying new gun-safety technologies.
The daily toll from guns is rising apart from the headline-grabbing massacres. The U.S. number of gun-related deaths reached 32,000 in 2011, rising 12 percent since 2000. The only larger category of deaths by injury is car accidents, which are headed the opposite direction, falling steadily from 55,000 in the early 1970s to fewer than 33,000 now.
The success with cars is an example cited by many gun researchers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an annual budget of about $150-million for safety research, far larger than anything spent to study gun violence, and other federal agencies also finance research aimed at promoting road and vehicle safety. Spending on gun-violence studies might never compare, but the strategy could be emulated, many scholars have argued.
Cars weren’t outlawed, Mr. Teret pointed out, but instead their injury-causing accidents were methodically tallied, categorized, and analyzed. Every aspect of fatal crashes was put into databases, he said, including drivers’ ages and conditions, road types and conditions, dates and times of day, and vehicle-identification numbers.
The industry opposed the research, with some car companies insisting that drivers, rather than their products, were almost always the problem, Mr. Teret said. But the data often told a more complicated story, and the work led to numerous unexpected life-saving changes and innovations, including seat belts, air bags, and wider wheel bases, and the positioning of trees and boulders farther back from roadways.
Lessons From Inmates
Even apart from the treacherous politics surrounding guns, similar progress will be daunting. They’re smaller and harder to track than cars, and their legal treatment, as well as the training for their use, varies widely.
Already that has led to plenty of discouragement. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, Michael L. Recce, an associate professor of information systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, took up a challenge from his state legislature to invent a safer gun. With a background in physics and computer science, he devised a gun with microelectronics that recognize the unique grip of each hand and allow only authorized users to fire the weapon.
Mr. Recce said he faced and resolved many concerns, including the need to shoot while wearing gloves or while gripping the weapon in stressful situations, but he could not get a manufacturer to try it or lawmakers to require it. Discouraged, he abandoned the project.
“Unfortunately I don’t think that it’s a pure-research-is-the-answer issue here,” said Mr. Recce, who now develops Internet advertising strategies.
Unlike their colleagues in other sciences, those in the small and poorly financed field of gun-violence research are further hindered by their inability to use a standard exploratory tool, randomized trials. They can’t randomly arm some people and disarm others.
Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, sees a solution in the landmark 1982 study by Peter H. Rossi and James D. Wright of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in which they asked more than 1,800 prison inmates questions about their ownership and use of guns. Key findings were that criminals will get guns regardless of legal prohibitions, and that they most fear accosting someone who turns out to be armed.
That study needs to be expanded and updated, Mr. Kleck said. But the first new federal grant opportunity since Mr. Obama’s announcement, an offer of $1.5-million from the Justice Department’s research division, is worrying, said Mr. Kleck, because it states a preference for projects that use randomized selection techniques.
“I don’t think they’re trying today to rig the results,” said Mr. Kleck, whose own research concludes that higher rates of gun ownership reduce violence, “but I can only judge that by whoever gets the money after the dust settles.”
One researcher widely cited by others as a leader in their field, Randolph Roth, a professor of history and sociology at Ohio State University, also predicts great value in studying past behaviors. He has noted the rapid rise in gun-related deaths in the 1850s, after the era of muzzle-loaded guns and pistols, which couldn’t be loaded quickly or in advance.
At the same time, history also shows that the problem of violence and killings has surged and ebbed independently of guns and gun technology, Mr. Roth said. Rather than gun-ownership levels, he said, the most reliable indicator throughout history of levels of violence in society is the level of trust in government—such as in the 1980s, when many white males reveled in the election of Ronald Reagan.
“Those kinds of feelings dampen down the hostile, predatory, and defensive emotions that generate homicide on a day-to-day basis,” Mr. Roth said.
Others are reaching similar conclusions. Jennifer L. Lanterman, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada at Reno, sees the American gun-violence problem as far broader than the type of weaponry available. “How do you, for a lack of a better term, fix that cultural problem?” Ms. Lanterman asked. “And that’s an uncomfortable question that people don’t want to broach.”
