Author: Rachel Ehrenberg / Source: Science News
In the fraught days following a mass shooting, people often ask if an assault weapons ban or allowing concealed carry permits would reduce the likelihood of further violence.
But reliable evidence on the effects of those policies can be hard to find.Now the largest comprehensive analysis of research on U.S. gun policy in years offers some answers, but also troubling little guidance. A glaring finding of the study, published by the RAND Corporation March 2, is how little work has been done to know which policies work.
“The research literature on gun policies is really very thin,” says Andrew Morral, a behavioral scientist at RAND, a nonpartisan institute based in Santa Monica, Calif.
Ideally, solid research leads to effective public health policies, which then reduce deaths, be it from guns, car accidents or fires. But when it comes to gun research, good science is lacking, says Morral, who led the study. So legislators typically turn to experts and advocates who can disagree vehemently about the effects of laws.
The goal of the report is to help people understand “what is reasonably well-known and what isn’t,” says Morral. “Hopefully we can work from there and identify where research can be most helpful.”
Compared with other leading causes of death, research into gun violence is among the least funded, an analysis of U.S. mortality data and federal funding from 2004 to 2015 reveals.
Funding for research on gun violence is 1.6 percent of what would be expected, given the number of gun deaths.
Source: D.E. Stark and N.H. Shah/JAMA 2017
Morral and his colleagues reviewed existing research on 13 types of gun policies, including concealed carry laws and waiting periods, and their impact on health, and safety, including mass shootings, suicides and accidental deaths. Next the researchers looked to see if those studies were any good. Out of thousands of studies considered for the analysis, a mere 63 met the research team’s strict criteria: Studies had to use rigorous methods and establish cause and effect.
The team ranked the strength of the evidence of a given policy’s effectiveness as limited (at least one study showed an effect, which wasn’t contradicted by other studies), moderate (two or more studies showed the same effect, no contradictory studies) or supported (three or more studies with at least two independent datasets found an effect with no contradictory studies). Here are the biggest takeaways:
1. There’s not enough data to show what would prevent mass shootings. There is no universal definition of a mass shooting, which, along with their relative rarity, makes it hard it hard to spot trends, such as whether mass shootings are on the rise. Studies looking at seven of the investigated policies,…
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