“Public health researchers uncovered consequences of particular gun-related policies, often against headwinds of political resistance and wavering funding support.”

Research into firearms has been mired in polarizing politics for much of the past three decades. Over this time period, public health emerged as the primary framework that tracked information about the effects of guns on people’s lives. Public health researchers uncovered consequences of particular gun-related policies, often against headwinds of political resistance and wavering funding support. These findings lay the foundation for better understanding the armed petri dish that is the United States—a country that boasts less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but over 40 percent of its civilian-owned firearms.1Aaron Karp, Estimating Global Civilian-held Firearms Numbers (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, June 2018).

Public health and biomedical research reveals vital trends in gun-caused morbidity and mortality. Yet key findings frequently become enmeshed in debates, divisions, and resistances that threaten to lessen the viability of research for the communities that would seemingly benefit most—i.e., communities where there are a lot of guns.

For instance, multiple public health studies have shown that states that make it easier for people to buy and carry guns see increased rates of gun injuries, homicides, suicides, and partner and accidental shootings.2See Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019). Research also ties increased fatality rates to specific policy or political decisions—such as in a widely cited paper from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research that uncovered surging rates of firearm-related death following Missouri’s repeal of a so-called permit-to-purchase (PTP) handgun law.3Daniel Webster, Cassandra Kercher Crifasi, and Jon S. Vernick. “Erratum To: Effects of the Repeal of Missouri’s Handgun Purchaser Licensing Law on Homicides,” Journal of Urban Health 91, no. 3 (2014): 598–601.
See also
→Brian Burnes, “Missouri Gun Deaths Surpass Vehicle Deaths in 2013, Part of National Trend,” Kansas City Star, February 5, 2015.
→Jesse Bogan, “Behind a Rising Suicide Rate, a Struggle for Answers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 7, 2012.
→Christopher Ingraham, “People Are Getting Shot by Toddlers on a Weekly Basis This Year,” Washington Post, October 14, 2015.
→Sarah Fenske, “More People in Missouri Died from Guns in 2014 Than Car Accidents,” Riverfront Times, January 11, 2016.

In the face of these findings, one might imagine that legislators, lawyers, and citizens would act quickly to bolster public safety. Indeed, such responses follow rising rates of injury and fatality caused by most other man-made pathogens. After a fatal “duck-boat” accident on a Missouri lake killed 17 people in 2018, public and media outcry led to a flurry of lawsuits and legislative actions aimed at making the tour company and boat manufacturer accountable, while mandating safety measures to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

But when death comes from the barrel of a gun, the opposite effect generally results. Many of the same states that see rising gun fatality pass laws making it easier for people to purchase firearms and carry them in public. Public health research itself becomes a target. Gun-rights activists frequently work to undermine what they call the “tainted public health model,” and discredit funded gun research as “bad science supported by a government agency with an anti-gun bias.” On Fox News, progun author John Lott accused the Hopkins group and the media of promoting faulty methods and cherry picking data to make a “misleading case for gun control”—while repeating his mantra that more guns represented the best way to lessen gun crime.

The Dickey Amendment and research funding

This hyper-politicization of firearm research has evolved over the past three decades. In the early 1990s, physician and epidemiologist Arthur Kellermann and colleagues published a series of papers that discovered that homes of gun owners saw more homicides, domestic violence shootings, and gun suicides than did homes of non-gun-owners, and theorized that limiting access to firearms could prevent these types of shootings.4Arthur L. Kellerman et al., “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home,” New England Journal of Medicine 329, no. 15 (1993): 1084–91. In one paper about self-inflicted gunshot wounds, Kellerman advised that “people who own firearms should carefully weigh their reasons for keeping a gun in the home against the possibility that it may someday be used in a suicide.”5Arthur L Kellermann et al., “Suicide in the Home in Relation to Gun Ownership,” New England Journal of Medicine 327, no. 7 (1992): 467–72.

These seemingly self-evident findings—basically, that more people get shot in places where there are more guns—became lightning rods for controversy when GOP lawmakers, supported by the NRA, attacked the research in support of a rider to the 1996 federal budget. That rider, known as the Dickey Amendment, posited an antigun bias in government-funded research, stripped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of funding for gun-violence-prevention studies and stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”6 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997, Pub. L. No. 104-208, 110 Stat.3009 (1996).
See also Michael Hiltzik, “The NRA Has Blocked Gun Violence Research for 20 Years. Let’s End Its Stranglehold on Science,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2016.
Congress renewed the ban continually and extended similar restrictions to other federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and of Mental Health.

The Dickey Amendment changed the course of gun-related research in the United States. In the 15 years after the ban went into effect, federal funding for firearm injury prevention fell 96 percent and peer-reviewed academic publishing on firearm violence fell by over 60 percent. A 2017 analysis found that gun violence was the least-researched major cause of death in the United States, as measured by the number of papers published, and the second-least-funded cause of death related to its death toll.7David E. Stark and Nigam H. Shah. “Funding and Publication of Research on Gun Violence and Other Leading Causes of Death,” JAMA 317, no. 1 (2017): 84. It was as if someone placed a silencer on knowledge.

“Lifting Dickey would undoubtedly lead to more knowledge about the best policies and practices surrounding American firearms.”

Calls to reverse the funding blockade have grown louder over recent years. And indeed, lifting Dickey would undoubtedly lead to more knowledge about the best policies and practices surrounding American firearms. Opening research funds to the CDC, the National Institutes of Health and of Mental Health, and other agencies would support epidemiological research on firearm injury and death in the same ways they do other leading causes of shortened lifespans. This would mean more grants for investigators, databases available to study epidemic trends, and opportunities for publication. All of which would help close yawning gaps in our understandings of the best ways to improve safety and slow near-epidemic rates of gun injury and death.

Yet, would repealing Dickey bridge the profound divisions surrounding guns and gun rights in the United States? Or would more research only enhance polarization if not accompanied by better understandings of the ways that people talk and feel about guns, in addition to living with and dying from them?

A social science approach to gun violence

Enter social science research and its focus on talking to people on the ground in addition to quantifying trends found in data. From a disciplinary perspective, social science is often less reliant on federal funding than is public health, and has thus been able to traverse the terrain surrounding Dickey with a bit more flexibility. And from a methodological standpoint, social scientists have been able to step back to consider that frameworks of injury and death are not the only ways, and in some instances not always the best ways, to understand relationships between Americans and guns.

Social science can address best approaches to stem gun-related mortality in the context of firearm-related attitudes, biases, and belief systems. Put another way, social science methods allow researchers to consider what guns mean in addition to what they do. Doing so helps uncover broader tensions about why certain people feel they need guns in the first place, or why others reject them out-of-hand. Approaching US gun culture sociologically also allows social science research to dissect political divisions surrounding US firearm ownership and policy, as well as how attitudes about guns have been shaped—and manipulated—by gun manufacturers and the corporate gun lobby in ways that then carry profound implications for public health.

For instance, social scientists have begun to study the complex social meanings ascribed to firearms within progun communities. Here, guns convey familiarity and custom. Guns also connote connection to neighbors, or notions of cultural heritage. These types of associations in turn give particular charge to alarmist rhetoric suggesting that liberals, researchers, or particular politicians aim to “take away your guns”—the implication being they would uproot your families and traditions as well. For sociologist Harel Shapira, such associations highlight how, in certain parts of the United States, carrying a gun represents a central part of people’s lives and the Second Amendment “a key part of their identity.”

“Social scientists have begun to analyze ways that the NRA and gun manufacturers are uniquely effective at constructing markets for guns through appeals to an imagined past.”

Loyalty to guns is often not just personal or familial—it represents brand loyalty as well. Social scientists have begun to analyze ways that the NRA and gun manufacturers are uniquely effective at constructing markets for guns through appeals to an imagined past. For instance, the NRA long promoted guns through myths of settlers and cowboys who tamed the Wild West, guns in hand. In 2017, journalist Francis Clines visited the NRA Firearms Museum in Virginia and found that “a poster figure of John Wayne…offers a greeting here at the gun museum’s gallery door as he holds his Winchester carbine at the ready.” In his book Gun Crusaders, sociologist Scott Melzer exposes the role of Wayne-style gunslingers as a mythology not of the 1800s, but of mid-twentieth-century gun advertisers and popular culture. Guns were “unquestionably part of white westward expansion,” Melzer writes, “but the role of firearms in expansion has been greatly exaggerated,” and in reality many settlers who traveled west found little use for firearms in their daily lives.8New York: New York University Press, 2012More Info →

As Freud of course realized, guns also convey powerful associations to gender and can represent placeholders for underlying anxieties about potency or virility. Present-day social scientists expand on gendered associations of firearms in important ways. Sociologists have been at the fore of shifting understandings of guns and gun violence away from misleading stereotypes of mental illness and toward recognition of the roles of gender and masculinity. Eric Madfis reads the male gender–mass shooter connection to cultural standards dictating how men are expected to react to stress. In a different vein, Jennifer Carlson’s important research illustrates the complex ways that particular men use guns to navigate contexts of “social insecurity” about social and economic decline.9New York: Oxford University Press, 2015More Info →

Here as well, understanding these social associations leads to better recognition of the tensions surrounding gun markets. As one example, advertisers in their efforts to sell more guns adroitly tapped into working-class feelings of gendered disempowerment and resentment about globalization, immigration, or coastal elites who cast the middle of the country as one big flyover state. “The Armed Citizen, Protected by Smith & Wesson” read one campaign in the NRA magazine American Rifleman, while campaigns for the Tavor semiautomatic rifle claimed the gun would restore the “balance of power” for men who owned it. Glock ads told men that owning their guns restored “the confidence to live your life.” Agree with them or not, these types of messages played to powerful frustrations among certain gun owners and posited guns as restorative talismans in the face of societal change—in ways that are important for scholars and activists wanting to change gun-related practices to consider.

Social science research also addresses the complex associations between attitudes about guns and stereotypes of race. For instance, NRA rhetoric long posited guns as protections against, in the words of CEO Wayne LaPierre, “bad guys,” thugs, “terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels, and car-jackers.” According to sociologist Angela Stroud, such language plays to histories in which guns function as symbols of white authority.10Angela Stroud, Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 33. When Stroud asked white permit holders why they felt they needed guns, their answers highlighted a “criminal class” of people of color to justify gun ownership. “You hear about carjackings…let’s just say you pull up to a convenience store and there’s some certain people outside that make you feel a little nervous, then you’ve got your gun there…to make yourself feel more comfortable.” For Stroud, examples of white people who carried guns to protect against racial others were particularly important because most of the racialized altercations never actually happened. Rather, white gun owners imagined these encounters based on anxieties about persons of color. In such stories, gun ownership became a defense of internalized notions of racial order as well as about external personal safety.11Stroud, Good Guys with Guns, 88–89; 96 and 100–102.

Society responds differently when gun owners are not white. My current research studies how the US political establishment mobilized to disarm African American gun owners in the 1960s and 1970s.12See Metzl, Dying of Whiteness. This history lay the groundwork for differing responses to white versus African American open carry proponents in the present day. Frequently, mainstream society codes white men carrying weapons in public as patriots, while identifying armed black men as criminals.

“What assumptions about guns or gun owners shape attitudes about firearms among liberal non-gun-owners?”

Quantitative and qualitative expertise would also allow researchers to address nuanced questions that are both counterintuitive and self-evident. What common characteristics define the vast majority of gun owners who never discharge their guns in public settings, and whose names do not show up on morbidity databases? What are the psychological benefits of owning a gun? What assumptions about guns or gun owners shape attitudes about firearms among liberal non-gun-owners?

New research horizons

In asking and attempting to answer such questions, social science research can also provide deeper understandings of the ways Americans talk, and often talk past one another, about broader tensions and divisions signified by guns. Such research can also demarcate new opportunities for common ground among communities atomized and polarized by a needlessly contentious “debate” about something for which we all strive: safety.

Part of this work undoubtedly involves better understandings of how we came to our current, complex moment—in which children routinely participate in “mass shooter drills” in schools, while grown-ups struggle to achieve basic levels of agreement about how to stop future shootings. And it also involves asking difficult questions about what kind of society we create when we divide so readily into pro- or anti-, red or blue.

To be clear, guns injure and kill tens of thousands of people each year in the United States, and many of these injuries and fatalities are preventable. However, social science illustrates the benefits and potential drawbacks of framing gun-related morbidity as an epidemic or a public health crisis.13Howard Bauchner et al., “Death by Gun Violence—A Public Health Crisis,” JAMA 318, no. 18 (2017): 1763–1764. While doing so rightly calls attention to a dire need for intervention, it also limits recognition of the deeper biases and fissures that shape what guns mean, and what they come to represent. Guns may well signify a public health crisis in the present-day United States. But guns signal a social crisis as well.

References:

1
Aaron Karp, Estimating Global Civilian-held Firearms Numbers (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, June 2018).
3
Daniel Webster, Cassandra Kercher Crifasi, and Jon S. Vernick. “Erratum To: Effects of the Repeal of Missouri’s Handgun Purchaser Licensing Law on Homicides,” Journal of Urban Health 91, no. 3 (2014): 598–601.
See also
→Brian Burnes, “Missouri Gun Deaths Surpass Vehicle Deaths in 2013, Part of National Trend,” Kansas City Star, February 5, 2015.
→Jesse Bogan, “Behind a Rising Suicide Rate, a Struggle for Answers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 7, 2012.
→Christopher Ingraham, “People Are Getting Shot by Toddlers on a Weekly Basis This Year,” Washington Post, October 14, 2015.
→Sarah Fenske, “More People in Missouri Died from Guns in 2014 Than Car Accidents,” Riverfront Times, January 11, 2016.
4
Arthur L. Kellerman et al., “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home,” New England Journal of Medicine 329, no. 15 (1993): 1084–91.
5
Arthur L Kellermann et al., “Suicide in the Home in Relation to Gun Ownership,” New England Journal of Medicine 327, no. 7 (1992): 467–72.
6
Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1997, Pub. L. No. 104-208, 110 Stat.3009 (1996).
See also Michael Hiltzik, “The NRA Has Blocked Gun Violence Research for 20 Years. Let’s End Its Stranglehold on Science,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2016.
7
David E. Stark and Nigam H. Shah. “Funding and Publication of Research on Gun Violence and Other Leading Causes of Death,” JAMA 317, no. 1 (2017): 84.
8
New York: New York University Press, 2012More Info →
9
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015More Info →
10
Angela Stroud, Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 33.
11
Stroud, Good Guys with Guns, 88–89; 96 and 100–102.
12
See Metzl, Dying of Whiteness.
13
Howard Bauchner et al., “Death by Gun Violence—A Public Health Crisis,” JAMA 318, no. 18 (2017): 1763–1764.