RAND Corp. reviews gun violence studies

Vox.com published an article by German Lopez describing a huge review done by the RAND Corporation of the available gun research studies.   Only limited conclusions can be drawn, but they point in one direction.   

Gun control can save lives.

"For decades, the federal government, with the support of the National Rifle Association, has made it very difficult to answer a question at the heart of American public health and safety.   Does gun control work?

"The answer is hugely important given that guns killed nearly 39,000 Americans in 2016 alone.   But after research on gun violence in the 1990's found that firearms do not-- contrary to NRA talking points -- make people safer, the group [the NRA] backed a federal funding freeze on gun policy research."

[This refers to the Dickey amendment, passed by Congress in 1996, which forbids the CDC from spending any federal funds to research the effects of gun violence.  See ShrinkWrap13, March 2, 2018.]

"But studies have gone on -- just without federal funding.  And on Friday, a nonpartisan think tank, the RAND Corporation, released the results so far of its Gun Policy in America initiative, a two-year dive into the research on gun violence and the laws trying to curtail it.

"RAND's extensive report does not make any sweeping declarations about gun policy.  It does, however, make clear that gun control research is very limited, calling on Congress to lift the NRA-backed funding freeze.  It argues that the freeze has, by making it difficult to conduct better studies, led to a confusing empirical environment, where it's easy for groups on both sides of the debate to cite shoddy work that supports their prior beliefs.

"'The studies that have been done often reach opposite conclusions to each other,' Andrew Morral, the head of RAND's gun policy initiative, told me.  The lack of thorough research, he added, 'creates this kind of fact-free environment in which people can cherry-pick any study that happens to support what their priors are on the effects of the law.'

"Morral's team spent two years reviewing US-based studies published over the past several decades, pulling out the most rigorous to try to find some 'incontrovertible truths,.'   RAND concluded that, first and foremost, far more research is necessary.  'Many of the matters that people disagree on when they disagree on gun policy have not been rigorously studied in ways that produce reasonably unambiguous results.' Morral said.

"But there were some things that could be gleaned from the available evidence.   While RAND as a nonpartisan group avoided any sweeping policy conclusions in its analysis, its review does seem to point in a direction, based on my own reading:  More permissive gun policies lead to more gun deaths, while more restrictive policies lead to fewer gun deaths.  Coupled with other evidence in this area, that supports the idea that more guns lead to more gun deaths.

"Given that America is dealing with an immediate gun violence problem, as mass shootings and deaths pile up, the report is worth taking seriously.   At the very least, there's enough evidence to suggest that the federal government should stop refusing to fund research on policies that really could work to save thousands of lives every year."

The extensive RAND report is available here:

https://www.rand.org/news/press/2018/03/02.html

Though limited in comprehensiveness due to the federal prohibited research funding, this is an important preliminary report.   It's #1 conclusion is that far more extensive research is badly needed.    What we have is being misused to cause further confusion. 

The #2 conclusion is that the data from the more rigorous of these studies do point in one direction:   more guns result in more gun deaths.   Some specific regulations, like more effective background checks, do have at least some modest effects in reducing gun deaths.

But much, much more research and study must be done.   It approaches criminal intent for politicians to continue to refuse to allow funding for serious, comprehensive research on gun safety.

Simply curtailing all the unnecessary travel expenses of President Trump's cabinet secretaries -- plus the president's own frequent multi-million dollar weekend trips to his golf courses -- could go a long way to making up the necessary funding.

Ralph