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measure what happens when current firearm own-
ers are later prohibited from possessing a firearm,
after, for example, committing a crime or receiving a
specific mental health diagnosis. Researchers will be
able to track outcomes in randomly assigned jurisdic-
tions that give owners different amounts of time to
surrender their guns.
These are the sorts of studies that Morral says have
significant potential to help us better understand gun
violence in America.
It’s a sentiment that Jay Dickey, who died in 2017,
might have shared. As he neared the end of his life,
Dickey advocated, with increasing vehemence, for
a return to the very sort of research his 1996 amend-
ment had halted. As he wrote in 2012, comparing gun
research to the proverbial question about when to
plant a tree: “The best time to start was 20 years ago;
the second-best time is now.”
D
Russ Juskalian is a freelance journalist and photographer
based in Munich, Germany.
databases compiled by government agencies such as
the CDC. Researchers tapping into that data have no
say over what information is collected or how. Instead
of being able to design rigorous, controlled studies,
they typically have to dig through someone else’s raw
data, hoping to find correlations.
“Ambitious projects that cost money have been very,
very difficult to do for the last 20 years,” Morral says.
There have been exceptions. In January, the
American Journal of Public Health published a study
on gun violence in some of Philadelphia’s high-crime
neighborhoods. Researchers divided more than
100 geographic clusters of vacant, blighted lots into
three randomly selected groups. Within each group,
the vacant land received either light intervention
(trash was collected and grass mowed), significant
intervention (the lots were transformed into parklike
settings with trees and new grass) or no intervention.
The experiment lasted nearly two years, and
researchers found a significant reduction in gun vio-
lence in the geographic clusters with vacant land that
had been improved in any way. What’s more, there
was no evidence that shooting incidents moved from
those improved clusters to adjacent areas.
Another study underway in California will
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