Can new research find a path around politics?

WASHINGTON» Dr. Bindi J. Naik-Mathuria, a pediatric trauma surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital who grew tired of seeing toddlers die of gunshot wounds, has a $684,000 federal grant to track every gunrelated death and injury in Houston. The goal: identify and address “hot spots” the way public health researchers track and contain the coronavirus.

Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency room doctor and longtime firearm violence researcher in California, is supervising scientific research on whether community interventions in Detroit and Cleveland — including the greening of vacant spaces and the work of so-called violence interrupters like former gang members — can drive down gun-related deaths and injuries.

And Andrew R. Morral, a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corp., a research group, is using sophisticated modeling tools to estimate rates of gun ownership in every state, with detailed demographic information. The purpose, he said, is to search for patterns in firearm homicides and suicides — a first, basic step in research that could lead to reducing them.

The mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder have once again left Democrats and Republicans in a stalemate over background checks for gun buyers and assault weapons bans. But public health experts say a new round of research could pave the way for gun policies that avoid partisan gridlock — and ultimately save thousands of lives.

The studies by Naik-Mathuria and the others are being paid for by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is once again funding research into gun violence after a nearly 25-year hiatus imposed by Congress. And while they might not reduce the number of massacres, mass shootings account for an extremely small percentage of the 40,000 Americans who die each year from gun violence.

“There’s at least five different gun violence problems in the country, and mass shooting is one of them,” said Morral, who has a doctorate in psychology. “There’s also suicide; there’s urban gun violence, which mostly affects minority young men; there’s family shootings; and there’s police shootings. And they all have different risk factors. They all have very different motives, and they often involve different firearms.”

Like cancer, there is no single cure for the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. If politicians want to make a difference, experts say, lawmakers need to quit the fruitless fights over whether liberals want to take people’s guns away and start financing — and listening to — research that could inform policies that could address the carnage.

“It’s not either ‘keep your guns or prevent gun violence,’” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who helped establish the CDC’s Center for Violence and Injury Prevention but said he was fired in the late 1990s under pressure from Republicans who opposed the center’s gun research. “There’s a strategy that science can help us define where you can do both — you can protect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and at the very same time reduce the toll of gun violence.”

Federal money for gun research all but disappeared after Congress in 1996 enacted the so-called Dickey Amendment, which barred the CDC from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.” It was named for Jay Dickey, a former Republican House member from Arkansas, who proudly proclaimed himself the National Rifle Administration’s “point man” in Washington.

In an extraordinary turn of events, Dickey, who died in 2017, befriended the man whose work he had cut off, Rosenberg. The pair grew so close that Rosenberg gave the eulogy at Dickey’s funeral.

In 2019, Rosenberg and Dickey’s ex-wife, Betty, a retired former prosecutor and chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, helped persuade Congress to restore the funding; lawmakers appropriated $25 million, split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, for firearm injury prevention research.

The agencies are now financing nearly two dozen studies, although backers of the research say the money is a pittance compared with the breadth of the problem.

“Millions of dollars have been put forth trying to figure out how do we eradicate cancer; we’ve got to be able to do the same with gun violence,” said Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Ga., who won election in 2018 by promising to end gun violence after her 17-year-old son was shot and killed.

Research on the effectiveness of gun policies is scant, and much of it is not rigorous enough to prove or disprove that any of the legislation being debated in Washington would do any good, said Morral, who directs RAND’s National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research and has done a comprehensive analysis of the serious scientific literature.

The existing research suggests that one policy under consideration in Congress — expanding background checks — could make a difference. RAND has found “moderately good evidence that the current background checks system is helpful” in reducing violent crime, Morral said, and so “it seems logical to think that background checks on all sales might help more.”

There is also moderately good evidence, RAND found, that waiting periods for gun purchases reduce suicide and violent crime. And there is strong — or what RAND calls “supportive” — evidence that laws requiring guns to be safely stored away from children reduce firearm injuries and deaths among young people.

But while President Joe Biden has claimed that the federal assault weapons ban that lasted from 1994 to 2004 “brought down these mass killings,” the evidence of that is unclear. There are only a handful of studies, Morral said, and they do not “persuasively show a causal effect” — not because there is not one, he said, but because of shortcomings in the study design.

After the recent development of coronavirus vaccines highlighted the importance of scientific research, Rosenberg said, the public is primed to accept the argument that gun violence research can save lives. He likened it to the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government poured into studying motor vehicle deaths in the 1970s and ’80s, which led to safety measures such as seat belt requirements and lower speed limits, saving millions of lives.

That was the argument he used to help persuade Congress to appropriate money for gun violence research in 2019.

The research itself was never banned outright, and in 2013, weeks after the massacre that killed 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, President Barack Obama directed the CDC to reconsider funding studies on gun violence.

The agency commissioned a report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council outlining priorities, but little changed.

Naik-Mathuria, the Houston trauma surgeon, said she would like to see Washington address the problem of gun violence as a matter of injury prevention, not politics. She began researching methods to reduce gun violence about six years ago, she said, after seeing “kids come in dead because they shot themselves in the head when they found a gun at home.”