The National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research: Five Years of Accomplishments
Just five years ago, little scientific evidence existed on the effects of gun laws in the United States.
By Andrew R. Morral, Liisa Ecola, Heather McCracken
What are the effects of red flag laws? What risks do people face when living with gun owners? What influences young people to carry guns?
Just five years ago, little scientific evidence existed to answer to these questions. That’s because for two decades research on gun violence prevention had been largely unfunded at a federal level. The 1996 Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the use of federal research funding to promote gun control, had halted most funding for gun policy research.
RAND’s extensive Gun Policy in America initiative, first released in 2018, showed the dire effect of that funding drought. Despite gun violence being among the leading causes of death in the United States, there were many gaps in basic evidence. That sparked recognition of the fact that to develop fair and effective gun policies, policymakers needed a shared set of facts to work from.
Shortly after RAND released its initial findings, the Houston-based philanthropic fund Arnold Ventures agreed to support continued work on the Gun Policy in America initiative. Arnold Ventures further asked RAND to establish and manage a National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research (NCGVR), a private philanthropy with a mission to fund and disseminate rigorous scientific research to broaden agreement on the facts associated with gun policy. Arnold Ventures contributed $20 million to this new organization, which was planned to complete its work within five years.
Despite gun violence being among the leading causes of death in the United States, there were many gaps in basic evidence.
NCGVR later attracted additional support from funders including Wells Fargo Bank, Missouri Foundation for Health, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. NCGVR’s funding priorities, and decisions on each funding round, were made by a high-level advisory committee led by Frank Clark.
Growing the Evidence Base
NCGVR’s first request for proposals, released in early 2019, attracted almost 250 submissions of interest, resulting in 17 funded projects totaling $9.8 million on topics including suicide, school violence, officer-involved shootings, and firearm safety.
Since then, through five more rounds of grantmaking, NCGVR has allocated more than $24 million to fund 57 research projects nationally on gun violence prevention. These projects have produced important scientific knowledge about firearm violence that is likely to affect personal firearm decisions and public policymaking. For instance:
- In a pair of studies examining risks associated with living in a home with a firearm owner, women living with handgun owners were nearly 50 percent more likely to die by suicide compared with women living in gun-free homes. People who live with a gun owner were also more than twice as likely to die by homicide than those living in gun-free homes.
- With regard to red flag laws, research found that about 10 percent of the time that Extreme Risk Protection Orders were issued (662 out of 6,787 in six states), the order was in response to the threat of a mass shooting (involving at least three victims). K–12 schools were the most common target. The most frequent type of threat was the maximum casualty threat. This research demonstrates that ERPOs are commonly used to prevent mass shootings in these states.
- The odds of an active shooting in gun-free establishments were significantly lower (odds ratio 0.38) than in non–gun free establishments. These results suggest that gun-free zones do not attract active shooters and may actually be protective against active shootings, challenging the argument for repealing gun-free zones for safety reasons.
- A study analyzing over 380,000 crime guns recovered in California from 2010 to 2021 found a dramatic increase in firearms recovered shortly after purchase, from 7 percent in 2010 to 33 percent in 2021, suggesting a rise in legal firearms being diverted for criminal use. The study also documented rapid growth in privately manufactured firearms (PMFs or “ghost guns”) in recent years.
- A cohort study of California firearm owners estimated the effects of Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) on suicide, finding that approximately one suicide death is prevented for every 22 ERPOs issued.
- A new training program teaching police officers to consider multiple interpretations of situations led to improved decisionmaking, reducing uses of force, discretionary arrests, and arrests of Black civilians, while maintaining officer activity levels and reducing officer injuries.
- Implementing comprehensive background checks from 2013 to 2015 in Colorado, Delaware, Oregon, and Washington did not lead to significant reductions in state-level firearm homicide or suicide rates. The small changes observed were not clearly distinguishable from natural variation, suggesting that extending background check requirements to private transfers alone is insufficient to significantly reduce firearm fatalities at the state level.
- Chicago’s arrest rate for homicides dropped significantly from 91 percent in 1965 to 57 percent in 1994, mirroring a national trend. Analyzing changes in the case mix from 1965 to 2020, such as the increase in outdoor shootings of male victims, reveals that case mix changes do not explain the decline. Instead, it is attributed to a higher operational standard for making arrests, suggesting that the arrest rate may not accurately reflect police performance and offering a more positive interpretation of the declining rates.
Disseminating Findings
Findings from many of the funded projects have been published in leading scientific journals and have been reported in news media. Grantees have written commentaries, created fact sheets, appeared on podcasts, and made videos to better publicize their findings to the public. If possible, NCGVR-funded project data have been made publicly available to support additional research. Research continues to be published out of the NCGVR-funded projects: 83 papers have been published to date and are available to the public on the NCGVR website.
This year NCGVR is holding its second series of public webinars discussing research findings from funded work. These webinars, which are available to view online, have focused on topics including intimate partner violence, the effectiveness of Extreme Risk Protection Orders, and interventions to improve police effectiveness.
NCGVR Director Andrew Morral and grantees have testified or consulted with state and federal legislatures on the evidence for firearm violence prevention, ensuring that the most important findings reach the decisionmakers who need them.
Supporting Researchers
The lack of funding for gun violence research for so many years had a secondary effect: it limited career opportunities for researchers. With grants for doctoral and postdoctoral students, NCGVR aimed to grow expertise in gun violence prevention. NCGVR has funded 13 doctoral students and seven postdoctoral researchers across the country, most of whom continue to work on topics related to gun violence and harm prevention.
NCGVR has funded 13 doctoral students and seven postdoctoral researchers across the country, most of whom continue to work on topics related to gun violence and harm prevention.
This funding also has supported researchers from historically Black universities as well as projects using participatory methods that have expanded the representation of communities affected by gun violence.
In 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, NCGVR convened monthly research seminars for grantees to discuss their projects. This opportunity for collaboration and mutual support brought together 50 to 80 researchers each month for a year to discuss new findings, research methods, and ideas for improving funded projects.
In 2022, NCGVR was part of a collaborative effort to host the first national conference on gun violence prevention research. The inaugural conference attracted more than 500 attendees and was supported by more than a dozen federal agencies and private foundations.
This led to the establishment of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms. This new group hosted a second annual meeting, attracting more than 700 attendees and more than 300 scientific presentations. The third annual meeting will occur in Seattle in December 2024.
Maturing the Field
Since 2018, other sources of funding have also helped to substantially grow the field of gun violence research. Since 2019, Congress has approved $25 million in annual appropriations for firearm violence research, split between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Other private funders have also entered the field, driving what Morral described as “a new era in firearm violence prevention research.”
In March 2023, Arnold Ventures funded another round of grants focused on understanding the costs and benefits of ERPOs, which allow law enforcement to petition a court to have firearms removed from individuals deemed by the court to present a risk of violence to themselves or others. This round of grantmaking will fund an additional seven projects, for a total of $2.8 million in funding.
The field of research on firearm violence prevention has grown and diversified enormously in the past decade, in part because of the transformative investments made by NCGVR. The result has been a windfall of new scientific results, with more to come, that will help individuals and governments devise more effective strategies for preventing gun violence.
This originally appeared on rand.org on August 6, 2024.
