What could actually work to fix gun violence in America — and what doesn’t
In the wake of high-profile shootings, proposals such as banning assault weapons gain momentum. But there are solutions few national politicians are looking at that take a very different tack
Originally published at www.theguardian.com on June 23, 2016.
Another shooting. Another set of grieving families. Confronted with America’s dramatic rates of gun violence, most people agree that something must be done. It’s agreeing on that “something” which can prove elusive. Is there anything that works to reduce gun deaths in a country in which civilian gun ownership is a fundamental right?
The first step is to move beyond some of the immediate, outraged proposals brought forward after each high-profile shooting. A ban on military-style assault weapons might save a small number of lives, but is unlikely to make a larger difference. America’s gun violence problem is so much bigger than mass shootings, whose victims represent only a tiny percentage of the overall toll of gun murders each year.
What can be done to address this much larger toll of gun violence, which leaves nearly 100,000 Americans killed or wounded each year?
The problem here, for the most part, isn’t faulty guns or insufficient training. It’s dangerous people using guns effectively. The best approach to violence prevention is to zero in on that small number of high-risk people who are using guns to harm themselves or other people, and look at what might be done to prevent them.
Many of most promising strategies are not the ones you’re most likely to hear about on the news — or the ones your member of Congress may be talking about right now.
Want to do something about the enormous toll of urban violence? Universal background checks might help. But community advocates have also been pushing for more funding for local programs that have been shown to reduce gang-related murders by 25% to 40%.
Worried about mass shootings? If you’re concerned about military-style weapons, experts suggest, it may be more effective to focus simply on limiting ammunition capacity, rather than on banning the guns. And investing in threat assessment and intervention programs is probably more valuable than trying to fortify your local elementary school or hiring armed guards.
Want to do something about the intersection of mental health and guns? New York state passed a law after Sandy Hook requiring mental health professionals to report people who might be dangerous to themselves or others to a state database. Both gun rights and mental health professionals argued that this was a terrible idea that might make people less willing to seek mental health treatment. A better option: recognize that mental health is a serious factor in gun suicide, and policies that target suicide might be more effective than government databases.
That’s not to say that straightforward gun laws can’t be effective. There’s good research to suggest that tougher state laws focused on domestic abusers are effective, good news as tougher state domestic violence laws have continued to advance across the country.
Here’s a brief introduction to a few of these promising strategies.
Urban, gang-related violence: the Boston ceasefire strategy
Chicago, Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit: decades of gun violence have had a devastating impact on some of the country’s economically struggling neighborhoods.
The violence, rooted in segregation, unemployment, mass incarceration, and the “war on drugs”, can seem like a hopeless and intractable problem. But decades of justice department-funded research has identified several promising strategies for reducing gun violence — not over the long term, but immediately, in a matter of months.
Cities that have done in-depth analyses of their gun violence problem have found something surprising: the majority of violence is driven by a very small number of young men. In Oakland, for instance, just 1,000 members of a few active street groups were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. The violence was not fueled by turf wars or drug business, for the most part, but by long-running feuds and arguments among loose groups of young men engaged in other illegal activities.
Communicating directly with these young men — and offering both assistance and intense law enforcement attention — led to an immediate drop in violence. This “ceasefire” or “focused deterrence” strategy, first launched in Boston in 1996, requires coordination between police departments, prosecutors and community members in the neighborhoods most affected by violence.
These are not easy partnerships to form, and they often require addressing police departments’ legacies of racism and failed violence prevention strategies. But in Boston, the ceasefire collaboration led to a 63% reduction in monthly youth homicides — a sudden drop in violence dubbed “the Boston miracle”. The strategy has been replicated across the country, but has often struggled to sustain itself as police chiefs and mayors change — or as old funding sources dry up. The strategy’s typical results, according to sociologist Kenneth Rand, are “a reduction in the range of 15% to 35% in total homicides and 25% to 40% in gang or group-involved homicides.” This is a dramatic impact for a local program.
How long cities can maintain these results, though, is unclear. The program’s effectiveness has mostly been studied over the short term. At least one ceasefire site, in Kansas City, saw a clear drop in homicides in 2014, and then saw violence go up again, even though the strategy continues to be implemented. But Oakland and New Orleans have both seen dramatic drops in murder after implementing the ceasefire strategy — and, even as violence spiked in cities across the country last year, both cities have been able to maintain their lower levels of violence.
Domestic violence: tougher state gun laws work
Each year, an average of at least 760 Americans are killed with guns by their husbands, wives, ex-spouses, or dating partners, according to an Associated Press analysis of FBI data. Most of the victims are women, often the current wives or current girlfriends of the person who killed them.
Sometimes these domestic violence shootings are murder-suicides that end the life of both partners. Domestic violence also plays a role in mass shootings — a New York Times analysis found that some 10% of mass shootings were related to domestic violence. It also found that most of the victims and perpetrators were white.
Laws that target domestic abusers have been found to have widespread modest effects. Three studies found that states with laws that restricted gun access for people under domestic violence restraining orders reduced the number of gun murders. One 2006 study found that these tougher laws — which go beyond the federal ban on some domestic abusers — were associated with two fewer domestic gun homicides per state each year.
Suicide: the Gun Shop Project
Two-thirds of gun deaths in the US — roughly 20,000 each year — are gun suicides, and states where gun ownership is higher see dramatically higher gun suicide rates. Many of the victims are older white men.
In rural, gun-loving states like New Hampshire and Vermont, it’s gun dealers and gun rights advocates who are leading the charge to prevent these kinds of deaths.
“This is not an anti-gun or a veiled anti-gun campaign — this is strictly us helping ourselves,” said Chris Bradley, president of Vermont’s state NRA group.
For many people, suicide can be an impulsive act, and easy access to a firearm in a moment of crisis can be deadly. The Gun Shop Project’s strategy is to use friends, not law enforcement, to address that risk. It’s like the “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” campaign. In a moment of crisis,“we can hold their guns for them, talk to them, get them counseling, and once it’s over and done with, we’ll give them their guns back and there won’t be stigma attached,” said Eddie Cutler, the president of Gun Owners of Vermont. “Gun owners trust gun owners,” he said.
There’s no research yet that evaluates how well the gun shop strategy is working. But participants are optimistic — and proud of an approach that has brought people together across the normal partisan lines.
Mass shootings: threat assessment and high-capacity magazine limits
Mass shootings are comparatively rare, which makes them hard to predict. Many perpetrators fit a common profile — an alienated, disturbed, angry, mentally ill young man — but thousands like them never commit broader acts of violence, which makes writing a law to prevent mass shootings very troubling.
Mark Follman, a Mother Jones reporter who has led a project on mass shootings, has examined a different approach: threat assessment. Analysis shows there are often several missed chances to intervene before a mass shooting and researchers found the “weeks, months, or even years when a would-be killer is escalating toward violence are a window of opportunity in which he can be detected and thwarted”.
Law enforcement, mental health professions, and schools can help “connect the dots” about risky behavior and get help for young men in crisis. Sandy Hook Promise, founded by families of the Newtown school shooting victims, have worked to train schools and students to be aware of potential threats of violence and to say something — at least one school shooting appears to have been prevented because a student acted on the training.
A ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines might also make some difference to the lethality of mass shootings. The best rough estimate for a long-term impact of the ban, researcher Chris Koper suggested, might be a 1% reduction in shootings, or 650 fewer people shot per year. That effect would only begin to be seen after many years, once the US’s existing stock of large capacity magazines is used up. From a public health perspective, even a marginal reduction could be worth it, Koper argued, since the medical and social cost of a single gunshot injury is substantial.
Originally published at www.theguardian.com on June 23, 2016.
