As the debate over guns rages, a study out Friday underlined one key fact: There is little research in recent years to show whether gun policies can stem the bloodshed.
The RAND Corp., an influential think tank, created a research initiative called Gun Policy in America to provide a factual basis for the debate about gun policies to determine which work and which don’t.
But in reviewing available research, RAND found a lack of studies that documented laws reducing violence rather than just coinciding with the results. A review of thousands of studies yielded 62 with causal results about gun policies, only two-thirds of them in the last 15 years.
The reason: Federal funding for gun studies largely dried up 20 years ago. Annual spending bills in Congress since 1996 say no funding “at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
The shooting deaths of 17 people at a Florida high school on Feb. 14 rekindled the nationwide conversation about gun policies. President Trump, lawmakers in Congress and Florida Gov. Rick Scott and his state Legislature are each grappling over whether more restrictive laws are needed.
“We were hoping there would be a bigger kernel of truth around which people could start circling,” said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND who led the initiative. “It’s a little disappointing that there wasn’t more that we could find in that way.”
The RAND Corp., an influential think tank, created a research initiative called Gun Policy in America to provide a factual basis for the debate about gun policies to determine which work and which don’t.
But in reviewing available research, RAND found a lack of studies that documented laws reducing violence rather than just coinciding with the results. A review of thousands of studies yielded 62 with causal results about gun policies, only two-thirds of them in the last 15 years.
The reason: Federal funding for gun studies largely dried up 20 years ago. Annual spending bills in Congress since 1996 say no funding “at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
The shooting deaths of 17 people at a Florida high school on Feb. 14 rekindled the nationwide conversation about gun policies. President Trump, lawmakers in Congress and Florida Gov. Rick Scott and his state Legislature are each grappling over whether more restrictive laws are needed.
“We were hoping there would be a bigger kernel of truth around which people could start circling,” said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND who led the initiative. “It’s a little disappointing that there wasn’t more that we could find in that way.”
Source:
usatoday
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