The findings discussed below are from RAND’s sweeping Gun Policy in America initiative, one of the largest-ever studies of U.S. gun policy.
Throughout the course of the Gun Policy in America project, we consistently found inadequate evidence for the likely effects of different gun policies on a wide range of outcomes. This does not, of course, mean that the policies have no effects, but instead reflects the relatively scarce attention that has been focused on better understanding these effects. This is partly because of the reluctance of the U.S. government to sponsor work in this area at levels comparable to its investment in other areas of public safety and health, such as transportation safety. But even among private research sponsors, research examining the effects of gun policies on officer-involved shootings, defensive gun use, hunting and recreation, and the gun industry — outcomes of interest to many stakeholders in the gun policy debate — is virtually nonexistent. Furthermore, data that would help researchers examine the effects of gun policies are often either not collected or not shared. Here, we review some of these challenges to the scientific study of gun policies and recommend ways to improve this body of research.
Gun Policy Research Is Worth Funding
The science on which to base gun policy has advanced slowly since 2004, when a panel of the National Research Council concluded, “If policy makers are to have a solid empirical and research base for decisions about firearms and violence, the federal government needs to support a systematic program of data collection and research that specifically addresses that issue.” Unfortunately, federal support for research that could help states and communities reduce firearm crime, violence, and suicide remains very limited. Moreover, the state and federal surveys describing gun ownership and use — sorely needed to help researchers understand how state-level policies work — have not lived up to the optimism expressed by researchers in the early 2000s (see the 2004 National Research Council report and the 2005 review by Robert Hahn and colleagues). In some important respects, federal support has deteriorated since then.
Congress should consider lifting current restrictions in appropriations legislation, and the administration should invest in firearm research portfolios.
Of the 54 studies published since 2003 that met the inclusion criteria for our synthesis of available research on the effects of gun policies, just seven (13 percent) reported receiving any federal funding. Two studies were funded by the National Science Foundation, and one study each received funding from the National Institute of Justice; the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Ten studies received some support from private foundations, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Joyce Foundation each supporting four. In contrast, the large majority (40 studies, or 74 percent) reported no sources of external support.
Federal spending for research on gun-related mortality is far below the levels of funding for studying other sources of mortality in the United States. A 2017 study by David Stark and Nigam Shah found that, compared with federal funding for other sources of mortality that kill similar numbers of Americans, the federal government invests just 1.6 percent as much on gun violence research (see the figure below). With this federal inattention comes a corresponding inattention by researchers: Stark and Shah also found that the volume of research publications on gun mortality was just 4.5 percent of what would be expected based on publication volume for other leading causes of mortality.
Gun Violence Receives Less Federal Research Funding Than Most of the Top 20 Causes of Death in the United States
The federal government previously supported a more robust program of research examining firearm violence and policy. In the 1990s, the CDC was sponsoring millions of dollars of research on firearm violence. But when a group of researchers found that having a gun in the home was associated with an elevated risk of firearm homicide for members of the household, their results were viewed by some as a one-sided attempt to manipulate the gun policy debate. As a result, Congress passed the so-called Dickey Amendment in 1996, which cut $2.6 million of funding from the CDC, an amount equal to what its injury prevention center had been spending on gun violence research.
Private foundations should take further steps to help fill this funding gap by supporting efforts to improve and expand data collection and research on gun policies.
The Dickey Amendment also introduced new language forbidding the CDC from “advocating or promoting gun control.” As Arthur Kellermann and Frederick Rivara pointed out in 2013, this language did not explicitly prohibit research on gun violence or gun policy, but concern that any gun research could be viewed as advocacy has led the CDC to avoid supporting gun policy research lest it invite another negative budget adjustment like that in 1996. Congress has included Dickey Amendment language in every CDC appropriations bill since 1996. Moreover, in 2012, similar language was added to an appropriations bill for the National Institutes of Health in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012.
To improve understanding of the real effects of gun policies, Congress should consider lifting current restrictions in appropriations legislation, and the administration should invest in firearm research portfolios. Moreover, given current limitations in the availability of federal support for gun policy research, private foundations should take further steps to help fill this funding gap by supporting efforts to improve and expand data collection and research on gun policies.
The Focus of Gun Policy Research Should Be Expanded
Research examining the effects of many gun policies on several important outcomes, such as officer-involved shootings, defensive gun use, hunting and recreation, and the gun industry, has rarely been conducted in ways that allow for strong claims about the effects of the policies. Although it is understandable that researchers have focused primarily on suicides and homicides, this has resulted in a lack of information about how various laws might affect other outcomes. This may leave policymakers and the public especially prone to accepting some of the more alarmist claims made by either side of the debate. For example, in a 2015 survey conducted by Deborah Azrael and colleagues, the desire to protect oneself was self-reported as one of the primary reasons for gun ownership among 63 percent of all U.S. gun owners and 76 percent of all U.S. handgun owners. Yet rigorous studies of the effects of gun policies on individuals’ ability to defend themselves have rarely been conducted. This means that even policies that appear to be effective at reducing injuries and deaths, such as child-access prevention laws, may still be resisted by those who fear the effects that such policies will have on their ability to defend themselves. Until research is available that assesses how these policies affect outcomes of interest, we cannot begin to assess the trade-offs that may exist between the policies’ public health and public safety effects.
The U.S. government and private research sponsors should support research examining the effects of gun policies on a wider set of outcomes, such as self-defense.
The lack of research on how policies affect the gun industry is a particularly significant shortcoming in the available scientific literature. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released in 2017 suggest that more than 47,000 people in the United States are employed in the manufacture of small arms and ammunition. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade association, estimates that an additional 250,000 people may be employed in the distribution and sale of firearms and hunting supplies or in ancillary services, such as operating gun ranges or providing supplies or services to manufacturers and retailers. The National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation (conducted in 2011 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Departments of the Interior and Commerce) found that more than 12 million people used firearms for hunting, with total expenditures on firearms exceeding $3 billion and expenditures on ammunition exceeding $1.2 billion. In addition, more than 50 percent of all hunters also participated in target shooting, and 22 percent of hunters visited shooting ranges. But as important as the concerns of this industry may be to the fate of proposed gun policies, there is, at present, little scientific evidence available on the potential effects of gun policies on these activities and industries.
To improve understanding of outcomes of critical concern to many in gun policy debates, the U.S. government and private research sponsors should support research examining the effects of gun policies on a wider set of outcomes, including crime, defensive gun use, hunting and sport shooting, officer-involved shootings, and the gun industry.
Good Research Requires Good Data
The lack of research data on gun ownership, gun availability, and guns in legal and illegal markets severely limits the quality of existing research. There have been no regularly collected data series that describe gun ownership or use at the state level since the CDC suspended its collection of this information in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System surveys more than a decade ago.
Additionally, the federal government no longer routinely shares with researchers data on illegal gun markets, which investigators could use to examine how policies change the availability or flow of weapons from legal purchasers to criminal use or across state lines. This is a problem that has also worsened since the National Research Council identified it as a critical shortcoming for research on gun policy in 2004. Specifically, the Tiahrt Amendments (a series of provisions attached to all Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives appropriations bills since 2003) block most researchers from studying gun trace data. When trace data were available to researchers prior to 2003, the data provided important insights into how criminals obtain their weapons; whether states with more-restrictive gun laws create shortages of guns for those who may be prohibited from purchasing them; how guns move between states with less- and more-restrictive gun laws; the characteristics of gun sales likely to be associated with diversion to prohibited possessors; and other valuable, actionable, policy-relevant information.
A federal agency should resume collecting voluntarily provided survey data on gun ownership and use. Additionally, Congress should reconsider the restrictions it has imposed on the use of gun trace data for research purposes.
It is true that trace data and purchaser data have significant limitations that can make inferences about gun markets and crime difficult or uncertain. That is a caveat that applies to most data used in evaluating gun policies, but it is not a sufficient reason for prohibiting access to such data for research purposes.
To make important advances in understanding the effects of gun laws, the CDC or another federal agency should resume collecting voluntarily provided survey data on gun ownership and use. Furthermore, to foster a more robust research program on gun policy, Congress should reconsider the restrictions it has imposed on the use of gun trace data for research purposes.
Other crime and violence data systems (such as the National Violent Death Reporting System, the National Incident-Based Reporting System, and the National Crime Victimization Survey) provide valuable data that are useful in a wide range of study types. But, for various reasons, these sources have not yet been used in any studies of the effects of gun policies on crime or violence outcomes that met our inclusion criteria.
Our complete set of recommendations appears in our research synthesis report. In addition, we describe more-technical recommendations for researchers working in this field, which can be found in the essay on the methodological challenges to identifying the effects of gun policies.
References
- Azrael, Deborah, Lisa Hepburn, David Hemenway, and Matthew Miller, “The Stock and Flow of U.S. Firearms: Results From the 2015 National Firearms Survey,” Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 3, №5, 2017, pp. 38–57.
- Hahn, Robert A., Oleg Bilukha, Alex Crosby, Mindy T. Fullilove, Akiva Liberman, Eve Moscicki, Susan Snyder, Farris Tuma, and Peter A. Briss, “Firearms Laws and the Reduction of Violence: A Systematic Review,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Vol. 28, №2, 2005, pp. 40–71.
- Kellermann, Arthur L., and Frederick P. Rivara, “Silencing the Science on Gun Policy,” JAMA, Vol. 309, №6, 2013, pp. 549–550.
- National Research Council, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2004.
- National Shooting Sports Foundation, Firearms and Ammunition Industry Economic Impact Report, Newtown, Conn., 2017. As of October 18, 2017: https://d3aya7xwz8momx.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/EconomicImpactofIndustry2017.pdf
- Public Law 112–74, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012, December 23, 2011.
- Stark, David E., “Methods and Annotated Code Pertaining to Funding and Publication of Research on Gun Violence and Other Leading Causes of Death,” GitHub, January 4, 2017. As of February 1, 2018: https://github.com/davidestark/gun-violence-research
- Stark, David E., and Nigam H. Shah, “Funding and Publication of Research on Gun Violence and Other Leading Causes of Death,” JAMA, Vol. 317, №1, January 3, 2017, pp. 84–86.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Current Employment Statistics (National),” 2017. As of May 15, 2017: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceseeb1a.htm
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, and U.S. Department of Commerce, 2011 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, Washington, D.C., FH2/11-NAT, 2012.
This originally appeared on RAND.org on March 2, 2018, as part of the RAND Gun Policy in America initiative.
