Foundations Should Support Firearm Research

The tragedies caused by gun violence have rippled throughout the headlines in recent weeks:

• In Red Lake, Minn., a troubled young boy armed himself with a .22-caliber rifle, a .40-caliber handgun, and a 12-gauge shotgun and went on a shooting rampage that left 10 people dead.
• In Atlanta, a defendant facing a rape trial wrestled a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun away from a sheriff’s deputy and killed the judge and two court officials.
• In Chicago, a man tormented by an imaginary conspiracy to deny him redress for a disfiguring illness invaded a judge’s home and killed two members of the family with a .22-caliber handgun.
• In Brookfield, Wis., a worshiper troubled by something in a church service (no one knows what), returned with a 9-millimeter handgun, shot the minister, and opened fire on the congregation before killing himself.
• In Houston, a 4-year-old boy took a loaded .32-caliber automatic out of his mother’s purse and shot his 2-year-old brother.

What can the nation do to reduce this tragic toll? Foundations could help find the answers to this question. By supporting critical research, foundations can give law-enforcement officials, health professionals, and others the information essential to develop and evaluate potential solutions.

The urgency of the task has been made clear by the esteemed National Academy of Sciences. In December, after an exhaustive evaluation financed by the Joyce Foundation and others, the academy issued a report, “Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review,” which concluded that “current research and data on firearms and violent crime are too weak to support strong conclusions about the effects of various measures to prevent and control gun violence.” It added: “A comprehensive research program on firearms is needed if criminal-justice and crime-prevention policy is to have a sound basis.”

To see what the academy meant, take a look at the questions raised by the recent headlines.

Are shootings in public places like schools, churches, or courtrooms increasing, decreasing, or leveling off? How often is murder followed by suicide? Or, consider the deaths that don’t make the headlines but add up to a tragic toll of 30,000 each year. In domestic-violence cases, for example, what percentage of shooting victims had a restraining order against the offender? In suicides by young people, how often are antidepressants involved?

Answers to all of the above: We don’t know.

We lack basic information on violent death generally. And despite the efforts of a handful of valiant researchers at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California at Davis, and elsewhere, research on gun violence and potential public-policy solutions is woefully out of scale given the scope of the problem.

Gun violence isn’t just an occasional tragic incident. It’s a serious public-health epidemic — and one that is in large measure preventable. Collecting the basic information is essential if the United States wants to end this epidemic.

For relatively small sums, foundations can make a big difference by supporting research exploring patterns of gun violence, such as how access to firearms affects domestic violence, or the relationship between prescription drugs and suicide, or between alcohol and homicide.

They can also support research evaluating gun policies, such as trigger locks, one-gun-a-month restrictions, tougher sentencing laws, and concealed carrying of weapons.

Foundations can also connect researchers with law-enforcement officials, doctors, community groups, policy makers, and others who need and can use this kind of information to prevent future gun deaths and injuries.

That approach has worked in dealing with other problems. Consider highway fatalities. Information on every fatal automobile collision is collected in a national database and studied carefully.

Policy makers draw on the data to set speed limits, require seat-belt use, and determine penalties for drunk driving.

Engineers use it to improve the safety of cars, tires, steering wheels, air bags, roads, signs, stoplights, and pedestrian crossings. Researchers use it to study the effects of those decisions and recommend further improvements (for example, keeping small children safe from air bags).

As a result of such efforts, rates of motor-vehicle deaths per mile traveled have declined by more than 70 percent in the past four decades, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The National Academy of Sciences endorsed a similar approach to preventing violent deaths. It called for the systematic collection of public-health data, through the National Violent Death Reporting System (similar to the database on motor-vehicle deaths) under development at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The system, which covers 17 states, would help police, policy makers, violence-prevention groups, and public-health experts develop and evaluate strategies to reduce violent deaths, including domestic violence, child abuse, and suicide.

The academy also called for federal support for “a rigorous research program” on firearms and violence. Foundations can collaborate with government in financing such research.

We can find the kinds of smart strategies for reducing gun deaths that we already have for highway deaths, if we follow the national academy’s recommendations to develop the data. Right now, what we don’t know is killing us.

Ellen S. Alberding is president of the Joyce Foundation, in Chicago.