CONCLUSION
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67
68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84
85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101
102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115
None of the existing data sources, by itself or in combination with
others, provides comprehensive, timely, and accurate data needed to answer
many important questions pertaining to the role of firearms in violent
events. Even some of the most basic descriptive questions cannot be anMEASURING
swered with existing data. For example, the existing data do not reveal
information pertinent to answering the following questions: 12
1. Where do youth who shoot themselves or others obtain their guns?
2. In what proportion of intimate-partner homicides committed with a
gun does the offender also take his or her own life or the lives of the victim’s
children or protectors?
3. Did the number of people shot with assault weapons change after the
passage of the 1994 ban on assault weapons?
4. What are the most common circumstances leading to unintentional
firearm-related deaths? Are particular types or makes and models of firearms
overrepresented in unintentional firearm-related deaths?
5. What proportion of suicide or homicide victims were under the care
of a mental health professional? What proportion were intoxicated with
alcohol or illicit drugs at the time of death? How do these proportions
compare with those for suicides committed by other means?
There are many other such “unanswerable questions” about firearmrelated
violence, and even more that can be answered only with great
ambiguity. Data for estimating firearm-related mortality lack timeliness
and contain only limited information on key circumstantial and weaponrelated
variables. For firearm-related morbidity data, key circumstantial
and weapon-related information is also limited, and no nationally representative
data sources monitor firearm-related hospitalizations and disabilities.
Data on firearm storage practices, weapon carrying, and gun
safety training are not routinely collected. Data for studying noncriminal
violence are lacking.
Significant gaps exist in the nation’s ability to monitor firearm-related
injury and assess firearm-related policies. In the committee’s view, the most
important step to improve understanding of firearms and violence is to
assemble better data. In the absence of improved data, the substantive
questions addressed in this report are not likely to be resolved.
Emerging data have the potential to make important advances in
understanding firearms and violence. In particular, the National Incident-
Based Reporting System and the National Violent Death Reporting System
can provide a wealth of information for characterizing violent events.
Whether these data will also be effective for evaluating the effects of
firearms, injury reduction policies, or other firearm-related policy ques-
12We thank Catherine Barber and David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public
Health for providing these examples by personal communication.
tions is unknown and will almost certainly depend on the particular application.
No one system will be effective at answering all questions, but it is
important to begin by collecting accurate and reliable data to describe the
basic facts about violent injury and death. Thus, we are encouraged by the
efforts of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research
Center pilot data collection program, as well as the recent seed money
devoted to implement such a system at the CDC. We reiterate recommendations
made by past National Academies committees (e.g., Institute of
Medicine, 1999) and others to support the development and maintenance
of the National Violent Death Reporting System and the National Incident-
Based Reporting System. We also recognize that these types of data
systems have been the subject of great controversy and, in light of wellfounded
concerns, strongly urge that special care be taken to ensure the
credibility of these data.
The design and implementation plans for these and other proposed
data sets need to explicitly consider whether and how some of the more
complex and important policy questions regarding firearms and violence
might be resolved. There are many obstacles for developing better data:
• Methodological issues regarding how different data sets and prior
information might be used to credibly answer the complex causal questions
of interest.
• Survey sampling issues, including how to design surveys to effectively
obtain information on rare outcomes, geographical aggregation,
sample nonrepresentativeness, uncertain accuracy of self- and informant
reports, lack of standardization in data elements, and uncertain reliability
of cause-of-injury and fatality codes.
• Legal and political barriers that may make collecting important
data difficult if not impossible. For example, the 1986 Firearms Owners
Protection Act (the McClure-Volkmer Act) forbids the federal government
from establishing any “system of registration of firearms, firearm owners,
or firearms transactions or distribution.”
All of these issues should be carefully considered before new data collection
efforts are proposed or undertaken. The proliferation of firearm
data sources, without basic efforts to evaluate their validity and reliability,
to determine the possibility for linkages across data sets, and most importantly
to assess exactly which questions can be addressed with a particular
data set, will not lead to better policy research and violence prevention.
Thus, the committee urges that work be started to think carefully about
the prospects for developing data to answer specific policy questions of
interest. The design for collecting data and the analysis of that data should
be selected in light of the particular research question. For example, what
data are needed to support research on a causal model of the relation
between gun ownership or availability and suicide? Building such a model
would presumably involve estimating the probability that an individual
commits suicide conditional on gun ownership (or availability in some
sense). What data are needed to do this? What data are needed to estimate
the effects of policy interventions on the probability of suicide or on the
substitution of other means of suicide for guns? What other prior information
is relevant? What covariates should be included? Are data on them
currently available? Do data on covariates exist in a form that could be
combined with gun ownership or availability data? Is it necessary to construct
a new data set that includes both ownership or availability data and
the covariates?
If one is interested in answering the question of whether adolescents
with a gun in the home are more likely to successfully commit suicide than
adolescents who do not have a gun in their home, then home-level data on
gun possession and adolescent suicide are needed rather than aggregate
data concerning the numbers of guns in circulation. This type of information
could be used to address the basic question of what proportion of the
adolescents with a gun in their home eventually commit suicide with a gun.
Answering causal questions about firearms and suicide may require additional
information.
The same questions can be asked about the probability of committing a
violent crime with a gun conditional on ownership or availability. Similarly,
what data are needed to support improved research on firearms markets
and how criminals or suicide victims obtain firearms? How, if at all,
would improvements in trace data be used in studies of the effects of policy
interventions on firearms markets or any other policy issue? What would
the desired improvements contribute to research on policy interventions for
reducing firearms violence? How can trace data be used, considering the
deficiencies of these data?
Ultimately, linking the research and data questions will help define the
data that are needed. For example, attempting to answer the seemingly
basic research question, “How many times each year do civilians use firearms
defensively?” by using samples of data collected from crimes reported
to the police is a mismatch between the data source and the research question.
These surveys cannot reveal successful forms of resistance that are not
reported to the police.
This effort to think carefully about the data needed to answer some of
the basic research questions should take place in collaboration with survey
statisticians, social scientists, public health researchers, and representatives
from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms, and others. The research program should assess data
limitations of the existing and proposed data sets, regularly report the
results of that research both in the scientific literature and in forums acces52
sible to data users, and propose modifications to the data sources when
needed.
Careful attention should be paid to ownership, and use data. As we
demonstrate repeatedly in this report, the lack of credible data on gun
ownership and limited understanding of the relationship between ownership
and violence are among the most critical data barriers to better understanding
firearm-related violence. Thus, the committee recommends a research
effort to identify ways in which firearms acquisition, ownership, and
use data can be accurately collected with minimal risk to legitimate privacy
concerns.
A starting point is to assess the potential of ongoing surveys. For example,
efforts should be undertaken to assess whether tracing a larger
fraction of guns used in crimes, longitudinal data from the Monitoring The
Future survey, or enhancement of items pertaining to gun ownership in
ongoing national surveys may provide useful research data.
To do this, researchers need access to the data. Thus, the committee
recommends that appropriate access for research purposes be given to the
Monitoring The Future survey, as well as to the data maintained by regulatory
and law enforcement agencies, including the trace data maintained by
BATF, registration data maintained by the FBI and state agencies, and
manufacturing and sales data.13 These data may or may not be useful for
understanding firearms markets and the role of firearms in crime and violence.
However, without access to these systems, researchers are unable to
assess their potential for providing insight into some of the most important
firearms policy and other research questions. We realize that many have
deeply held concerns about expanding the government’s knowledge of who
owns what type of guns and how they are used. We also recognize the
argument that some may refuse to supply such information, especially those
who are most at risk to use guns illegally. More generally, we recognize that
data on firearms ownership and violence have been the subject of great
controversy. Nevertheless, there is a long established tradition of making
sensitive data available to researchers. In light of these well-founded concerns,
the committee strongly recommends that special care be taken to
ensure the integrity of the data collection and dissemination process. Concerns
over security and privacy must be addressed in the granting of greater
access to the existing data and in creating new data on acquisition, ownership,
and use.
13Current law prohibits the FBI from retaining data from background checks. If these data
were retained and provided in an individually identifiable form for research purposes, they
might provide useful information on firearms markets and measures of known gun owners
nationally. To determine the properties of these data, the FBI would need to retain the records
and researchers would need access to test their utility for informing policy.