knowledge of management and administration, as well as an ability to
interpret information. He said this was where Nightgale excelled.
‘Florence Nightingale believed – and in all the actions of her life acted
upon that belief – that the administrator could only be successful if he
were guided by statistical knowledge.’[39]
A , a public health specialist at the University
of Chicago, three things are required to stop an epidemic: an
evidence base, a method for implementation, and political will.[40] Yet
when it comes to gun violence, the US has struggled even with the
first step. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),
who would usually take the lead on public health matters, have done
very little research into the problem in the past two decades.
Without a doubt, the US is a big outlier when it comes to guns. In
2010, young American adults were almost fifty times more likely to
die in a shooting than their peers in other high-income countries. The
media tend to focus on mass shootings, which often involve assault
weapons, but the problem of gun deaths is far more widespread than
this. In 2016, mass shootings – defined as four or more people being
shot – made up just 3 per cent of US gun homicides.[41]
So why hasn’t the CDC done more research into gun violence?
The main reason is the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which stipulates
that ‘none of the funds made available for injury prevention and
control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control.’
Named after Republican congressman Jay Dickey, the amendment
followed a series of disagreements about gun research in the US. In
the run up to the vote, Dickey and his colleagues had clashed with
Mark Rosenberg, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention
and Control at the CDC. They claimed that Rosenberg, who co-
chaired a firearms working group, was trying to present guns as a
‘public health menace’ (the phrase actually came from a Rolling
Stone journalist who’d interviewed Rosenberg about gun violence).
[42]
Rosenberg had contrasted gun research to the progress made in
reducing car-related deaths, an analogy later used by Barack Obama
during his presidency. ‘With more research, we could further improve