20,000
25,000
30,000
35,000
40,000
U.S. Deaths by Firearms, 1968–2017
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1
3
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1
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2
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1
1
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0
9
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0
2
2
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0
1
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1
9
9
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32
DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
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A growing chorus of researchers wants to study
gun violence in the U.S. as a public health issue,
similar to the way they have tracked automobile or
workplace safety for decades. Though limited by
largely political obstacles around funding, experts
including epidemiologists, social scientists and stat-
isticians say that unbiased, peer-reviewed research is
a missing piece of the gun violence discussion. Given
the magnitude of the problem — not just in lives lost
but in the consequences for survivors, families and
entire communities — a purely scientific approach
may hold the key to making progress toward reducing
injuries and fatalities.
There’s one problem: Where to begin?
“We just don’t know very much,” says Andrew
Morral, a behavioral scientist who leads a RAND
Corporation initiative called Gun Policy in America.
“We haven’t been investing as a country in research
in this area in the same way that we have in motor
vehicle accidents, for instance, where for [more than]
35 years we’ve had an entire agency devoted to that,
collecting fantastic data. The result has been that
motor vehicle accidents are [a] quarter of what they
were at the time the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration was started.”
A 2017 JAMA study estimates that for every death
due to firearms, the U.S. spends about $63 on research
into the topic. In contrast, research spending on
motor vehicle deaths is about $1,000 per fatality.
That disparity is particularly striking because
the number of lives lost is similar: From 2008 to
2017, there were 342,439 deaths by firearm and
374,340 motor vehicle deaths.
As former congressman Jay Dickey wrote in 2012,
“The United States has spent about $240 million a year
39,773: how many
Americans lost their lives
to firearms in 2017.
1.625 million: the
number of Americans who
have died from gunfire
since 1968 — more than the
accumulated American
deaths from all wars since
the country’s founding
more than 200 years ago.
These are numbers that
everyone agrees on. From
here, nearly everything
else that can be said about
gun violence in the U.S.
elicits a partisan response.
It doesn’t have to be this
way.
A purely
scientific
approach
may hold
the key
to making
progress
toward
reducing
injuries
and
fatalities.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics