The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would cut off federal funding for critical research on firearm injuries at a time when we need it more than ever. Our old ways of controlling gun violence are not working any more.
We can learn perhaps from another problem. Last summer, wildfires in Canada burned triple the amount of land consumed by such fires in the past 50 years combined. For millennia, winter temperatures and snow have extinguished naturally ignited forest fires in northern latitudes, but climate change has made forests hotter, drier and more flammable. Human activity has irreversibly altered the conditions for controlling wildfires and we need to find new approaches for a hotter world.
There is a sobering lesson here that applies to our out-of-control gun violence problem in America. When one of us started working on this problem 40 years ago, there were approximately 100 million guns in civilian hands. In 2000, we had an estimated 259 million guns in civilian hands; by 2022, we had an estimated 410 million.
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Credit: contributed
There are now so many guns on our streets, and in our homes – and so many people filled with anger or despair who can access and use them against others or themselves -- that the resulting rate of firearm injury and death seems to be accelerating to a tipping point of no return.
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Credit: contributed
Following decades of official effort to reduce gun violence by enforcing gun eligibility criteria at the point of sale, the national firearm homicide rate increased by 45% from 2019 to 2021 — which translates into about 6,000 additional lives lost — during the most recent years for which CDC data are available. The annual number of gun deaths in the United States approaches 50,000. Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and teens.
Whatever we have been doing to prevent gun violence in the past is no longer working. We need to think differently and come up with some new approaches.
Studies by Harvard researcher David Hemenway and his colleagues have repeatedly shown that more guns lead to more gun deaths -- from homicide, suicide, accidents and shootings by law enforcement officers. When there are more guns in a community, more guns are stolen -- 400,000 gun thefts a year, according to a recent survey -- and more guns are sold without a background check.
More guns find their way into the hands of children and adults who are not legally supposed to have them. Police officers increasingly worry that they will encounter an anxious, angry, or stressed-out citizen with a gun. Parents have to worry that their children will have access to a gun that they might impulsively use to shoot another person or themselves. And teachers have to worry more about the possibility of guns in school.
It is not only the sheer number of guns, but the mix of increasingly lethal guns and the reasons people acquire and intend to use them that has shifted. Today, far more people purchase handguns and carry them for personal protection than in decades past. Researchers have shown that the expansion of “right-to-carry” laws have led to a substantial increase in gun-involved violent crime in states with these laws.
Gun licensing laws are associated with less gun violence, but some states are rolling back these laws. They are also being challenged in federal and state courts.
This is not to say that nothing we have been doing is working, but it is not enough. This is not the fault of the police. Nor should we blame advocates for gun rights, or advocates for gun violence prevention.
One of the most promising new tools is the extreme risk protection order (ERPO). States should enact and widely implement ERPO laws that enable police officers or, in some states, concerned family members and healthcare providers to seek a civil restraining order to temporarily remove firearms from a person who is behaving dangerously, threatening to kill themselves or another.
People also need to know, as a taken-for-granted reality, that having more guns does not make us safer and that the guns we have should be safely stored.
We need science to develop and evaluate new approaches to gun violence prevention. Having gun ownership data at the state level would help us conduct such studies. Without localized data, researchers can’t accurately assess the impact gun ownership has on firearm mortality.
We must redouble efforts to find out which approaches to prevention really work and which ways do not. The House vote to stop funding firearm injury prevention research will keep us from finding the new tools we so desperately need.
Now it is more important than ever that we use science to find new, effective approaches to fighting both wildfires and gun violence. For too long, some politicians’ persistent denial that humans play any role in climate change has obstructed a path to science-based solutions. And just like climate change is not the sole cause of worsening wildfires, the proliferation of firearms is not the only cause of increasing rates of firearm deaths.
But some politicians’ denial that firearms proliferation is a public health threat has blocked the search for sensible policies that balance public safety and individual rights. This is no time for denial or fatalism over gun violence. We can solve this problem by coming together to find new approaches and putting them to work.
Mark Rosenberg, M.D., was assistant U.S. Surgeon General and the founding director of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. He is also the president emeritus of The Task Force for Global Health. Jeffrey Swanson, Ph.D., is professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Firearms Law at Duke Law School and the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy.
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