OUR TASK
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Given the importance of this issue and the continued controversy surrounding
the debate on firearms, the need was clear for an unbiased assessment
of the existing portfolio of data and research. Accordingly, the National
Academies were asked by a consortium of both federal agencies—the
National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—
and private foundations—the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,
the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation—to assess
the data and research on firearms.
The Committee to Improve Research and Data on Firearms was charged
with providing an assessment of the strengths and limitations of the existing
research and data on gun violence and identifying important gaps in knowledge;
describing new methods to put research findings and data together to
support the design and implementation of improved prevention, intervention,
and control strategies for reducing gun-related crime, suicide, and
accidental fatalities; and utilizing existing data and research on firearms
and firearm violence to develop models of illegal firearms markets. The
charge also called for examining the complex ways in which firearm violence
may become embedded in community life and whether firearmrelated
homicide and suicide become accepted as ways of resolving problems,
especially among youth; however, there is a lack of empirical research
to address these two issues.
The task of the committee was not to settle all arguments about the
causes and cures of violence but rather to evaluate the data and research on
firearms injury and violence. Over the past few decades, there have been
many studies of the relationship between access to firearms and firearm
violence, family and community factors that influence lethal behavior, the
extent and value of defensive firearm use, the operation of legal and illegal
firearms markets, and the effectiveness of efforts to reduce the harms or
increase the benefits of firearm use. We have evaluated these data and
studies. In doing so, we have:
• Assessed current data bases so as to make clear their strengths and
limitations.
• Assessed research studies on firearm use and the effect of efforts to
reduce unjustified firearm use.
• Assessed knowledge of illegal firearms markets.
This report presents the committee’s findings.
GUN CONTROL AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT
Many people reading this report will ask whether the committee favors
or opposes gun control, accepts or rejects the right of people to own guns,
and endorses or questions the conflicting interpretations of the Second
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“the right of the people to keep and
bear arms shall not be infringed”).
Resolving these issues, though important, is not the task the committee
was given. We were asked to evaluate the data and research on firearm
violence to see what is known about the causal connection, if any, between
firearms on one hand and violence, suicide, and personal defense on the
other. In carrying out this task, we have tried to do what scholars are supposed
to do—namely, assess the reliability of evidence about the ownership
of firearms and discern what, if anything, is known about the connection
between firearms and violence. This involves looking at not only how many
firearms are owned and who owns them but also the complex personality,
social, and circumstantial factors that intervene between a firearm and its use
and the effect, if any, of programs designed to reduce the likelihood that a
firearm will cause unjustified harm.1 It also includes investigating the effectiveness
of firearm use in self-defense. It does not include making judgments
about whether individuals should be allowed to possess firearms or whether
specific firearm control proposals should be enacted.
Questions of cause-and-effect and more-or-less are not how many
Americans think about firearms. Some individuals believe that firearm ownership
is a right that flows directly from the Second Amendment or indirectly
from every citizen’s right to self-defense. Others believe that there is
no right to bear arms, and that firearms play little or no role in self-defense.
1A harm is unjustified if it involves a homicide, an accident, or a suicide. It is justified if it
involves the reasonable use of force by law enforcement personnel or by people defending
themselves against crimes. It is difficult, of course, to count justified and unjustified harms
accurately and even harder to discover whether a program intended to reduce unjustified
harm has actually done so and, if it has, whether it did so in ways that have not inappropriately
reduced justified harms. For a more detailed discussion of the definition of these terms,
see Black’s Law Dictionary (Gardner, 1999).
These competing beliefs are important and will inform the decisions
political leaders have to make. America did not, after all, suddenly become
a gun-owning nation. The private possession of weapons has been
an important feature of American life throughout its history. But important
as these beliefs are, they are not questions that can be easily resolved
through scientific inquiry. Committee members have no special qualifications
for deciding who has what rights or what the Second Amendment
may mean. If the Supreme Court had spoken out clearly on this part of the
Bill of Rights, the committee could assume something about what rights,
if any, it confers. But the Court has not spoken so clearly. It has allowed
Congress, for example, to ban the sale of sawed-off shotguns, but only on
the narrow grounds that no one had shown that having a weapon with a
barrel less than 18 inches long would contribute to the maintenance of a
“well-regulated militia.” And the Court has accepted restrictions on the
sale of firearms to felons. But so far, the Court has held that the Second
Amendment affects only federal action, presumably leaving states free to
act as they wish. (For a review of holdings on the Second Amendment, see
Appendix C.)
Our report is not for or against “gun control.” (We put gun control in
quotation marks because it is so vague: “gun control” can range from
preventing four-year-old children from owning guns to banning their ownership
by competent adults.) Knowing how strongly so many Americans
feel about firearms and various proposals to control or prevent controls on
their ownership, we here state emphatically that our task is to determine
what can be learned from existing data and studies that rely on them and to
make recommendations about how the knowledge base could be effectively
improved. Readers of this report should not be surprised that the committee
often concludes that very little can be learned. The committee was not
called into being to make policy about firearms. Political officials, responding
not only to data and studies but also to widely held (and often passionately
opposed) public beliefs, will have to make policy. They should do so,
however, with an understanding of what is known and not known about
firearms and violence.