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Abstract
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When bullets fired from a passing car sliced through the St. Louis night one Sunday in June, they hit two children, killing three-year-old Kenndei Powell and seriously wounding another little girl, age six. Police in the Missouri city were not immediately able to identify or find the shooter, and Powell joined the grim ranks of the 36,000 people killed by guns every year in the U.S., on average. An additional 100,000 are injured.
That adds up to 136,000 Americans harmed or killed annually by gun violence. Worse, the death side of this sad ledger is growing, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in an upward trend that began in 2015. While mass shootings in Sutherland Springs, Tex., or Parkland, Fla., dominate headlines, people such as the St. Louis children, cut down singly or by twos or threes, make up the bulk of the victims. Guns are a clear and present danger in this country, where there are about 393 million civilian-owned firearms—more than enough to put one in the hands of every man, woman and child and amounting to the highest rate of gun ownership in the world by far.
The tremendous toll makes gun violence a huge public health problem. Yet unlike other pressing health threats, Americans have few ideas about the most effective prevention strategies because there has been almost no large-scale research on the issue.
All that could change this year. In an appropriations bill this spring, the U.S. House of Representatives included $50 million to be used for such studies by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health—the first time in decades that this kind of support has been given. If the U.S. Senate concurs and the bill becomes law, researchers need to jump at this opportunity.
Congress created the research gap in the first place, so it is right for Congress to fix it. In 1996, after a series of studies linked gun ownership to increased violence and crime and prompted an antiresearch campaign from the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), legislators inserted language into the CDC's budget bill that said no money could be used to “promote gun control.” Congress also zeroed out the agency's budget for firearms research. The message was clear, and federally supported science in this area ground to a halt. ...
Language: en |