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| This combination of 2005 and undated file photos shows one of Charles A. McCoy Jr.'s guns included in evidence during his 2005 murder trial in Columbus, Ohio, left, and a side crash test on a 2008 PT Cruiser by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Nearly as many Americans die from guns as from car crashes each year. We know plenty about the second group and little about the first. A lack of research on how to prevent gun violence has left policymakers shooting in the dark as they craft gun control measures without evidence of what works. |
MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Nearly as many Americans die from guns as from car crashes each year. We know plenty about the second problem and far less about the first. A scarcity of research on how to prevent gun violence has left policymakers shooting in the dark as they craft gun control measures without much evidence of what works.
That
could change with President Barack Obama's order Wednesday to ease
research restrictions pushed through long ago by the gun lobby. The
White House declared that a 1996 law banning use of money to "advocate
or promote gun control" should not keep the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and other federal agencies from doing any work on the
topic.
Obama can only do so much, though.
Several experts say Congress will have to be on board before anything
much changes, especially when it comes to spending money.
How severely have the restrictions affected the CDC?
Its
website's A-to-Z list of health topics, which includes such obscure
ones as Rift Valley fever, does not include guns or firearms. Searching
the site for "guns" brings up dozens of reports on nail gun and BB gun
injuries.
The restrictions have done damage
"without a doubt" and the CDC has been "overly cautious" about
interpreting them, said Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun
Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health.
"The law is so vague it puts a virtual
freeze on gun violence research," said a statement from Michael Halpern
of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "It's like censorship: When
people don't know what's prohibited, they assume everything is
prohibited."
Many have called for a public
health approach to gun violence like the highway safety measures,
product changes and driving laws that slashed deaths from car crashes
decades ago even as the number of vehicles on the road rose.
"The answer wasn't taking away cars," said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
However, while much is known about vehicles and victims in crashes, similar details are lacking about gun violence.
Some unknowns:
-How many people own firearms in various cities and what types.
-What states have the highest proportion of gun ownership.
-Whether gun ownership correlates with homicide rates in a city.
-How many guns used in homicides were bought legally.
-Where juveniles involved in gun fatalities got their weapons.
-What factors contribute to mass shootings like the Newtown, Conn., one that killed 26 people at a school.
"If
an airplane crashed today with 20 children and 6 adults there would be a
full-scale investigation of the causes and it would be linked to
previous research," said Dr. Stephen Hargarten, director of the Injury
Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
"There's no such system that's comparable to that" for gun violence, he said.
One
reason is changes pushed by the National Rifle Association and its
allies in 1996, a few years after a major study showed that people who
lived in homes with firearms were more likely to be homicide or suicide
victims. A rule tacked onto appropriations for the Department of Health
and Human Services barred use of funds for "the advocacy or promotion of
gun control."
Also, at the gun group's
urging, U.S. Rep. Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas, led an effort
to remove $2.6 million from the CDC's injury prevention center, which
had led most of the research on guns. The money was later restored but
earmarked for brain injury research.
"What the
NRA did was basically terrorize the research community and terrorize
the CDC," said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who headed the CDC's injury center at
the time. "They went after the researchers, they went after
institutions, they went after CDC in a very big way, and they went after
me," he said. "They didn't want the data to be collected because they
were threatened by what the data were showing."
Dickey,
who is now retired, said Wednesday that his real concern was the
researcher who led that gun ownership study, who Dickey described as
being "in his own kingdom or fiefdom" and believing guns are bad.
He
and Rosenberg said they have modified their views over time and now
both agree that research is needed. They put out a joint statement
Wednesday urging research that prevents firearm injuries while also
protecting the rights "of legitimate gun owners."
"We
ought to research the whole environment, both sides - what the benefits
of having guns are and what are the benefits of not having guns,"
Dickey said. "We should study any part of this problem," including
whether armed guards at schools would help, as the National Rifle
Association has suggested.
Association
officials did not respond to requests for comment. A statement Wednesday
said the group "has led efforts to promote safety and responsible gun
ownership" and that "attacking firearms" is not the answer. It said
nothing about research.
The 1996 law "had a
chilling effect. It basically brought the field of firearm-related
research to a screeching halt," said Benjamin of the Public Health
Association.
Webster said researchers like him
had to "partition" themselves so whatever small money they received
from the CDC was not used for anything that could be construed as gun
policy. One example was a grant he received to evaluate a
community-based program to reduce street gun violence in Baltimore,
modeled after a successful program in Chicago called CeaseFire. He had
to make sure the work included nothing that could be interpreted as gun
control research, even though other privately funded research might.
Private
funds from foundations have come nowhere near to filling the gap from
lack of federal funding, Hargarten said. He and more than 100 other
doctors and scientists recently sent Vice President Joe Biden a letter
urging more research, saying the lack of it was compounding "the tragedy
of gun violence."
Since 1973, the government
has awarded 89 grants to study rabies, of which there were 65 cases; 212
grants for cholera, with 400 cases, yet only three grants for firearm
injuries that topped 3 million, they wrote. The CDC spends just about
$100,000 a year out of its multibillion-dollar budget on firearm-related
research, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said.
"It's
so out of proportion to the burden, however you measure it," said Dr.
Matthew Miller, associate professor of health policy at the Harvard
School of Public Health. As a result, "we don't know really simple
things," such as whether tighter gun rules in New York will curb gun
trafficking "or is some other pipeline going to open up" in another
state, he said.
What now?
CDC
officials refused to discuss the topic on the record - a possible sign
of how gun shy of the issue the agency has been even after the
president's order.
Health and Human Services
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement that her agency is
"committed to re-engaging gun violence research."
Others
are more cautious. The Union of Concerned Scientists said the White
House's view that the law does not ban gun research is helpful, but not
enough to clarify the situation for scientists, and that congressional
action is needed.
Dickey, the former congressman, agreed.
"Congress
is supposed to do that. He's not supposed to do that," Dickey said of
Obama's order. "The restrictions were placed there by Congress.
"What I was hoping for ... is `let's do this together,'" Dickey said.
