Unleash the Power of Science to Save Lives

The United States spends $240 million a year on traffic safety research. That research—which helped improve car and road safety—has saved 360,000 lives since 1970 and produced a 28 percent reduction in the rate of annual car accident deaths between 1999 and 2014.

We rely on science to solve the ever-evolving challenges presented by driver behavior on our roads. For instance, in 2012, federally funded researchers learned that texting and other driver distractions played a role in over three thousand car deaths. In response, almost all of the fifty states banned driving while texting. Two years later, a study found that such laws resulted in a lower rate of deaths among young drivers.¹

Imagine how many lives we could save if our government funded scientific research into the best ways to reduce gun violence. Right now, in most cases, it does not.

In 1996 the NRA pressured Congress to pass a legislative rider that virtually banned federal dollars from funding scientific research about gun violence as part of that year’s spending bill, and Congress has renewed the rider ever since.² Why? It’s obvious. The research would almost certainly corroborate and extend previous research showing that many guns are too dangerous for the civilian market, increasing pressure to shrink the marketplace for gun manufacturers and require the industry to adopt new safety measures.

Screw industry profits! Life is more important. We must invest heavily in research and develop an ambitious agenda to unlock the potential of science to save thousands of lives. Here are key questions that deserve scientific answers:

•  How do guns make their way onto crime scenes?

•  What are the risk factors for gun violence and what are the best ways to address them? In particular, why are nearly all shootings committed by men, and what does this gender gap tell us about solutions?

•  How do individuals who commit gun crimes obtain their guns?

•  What is the best way to design guns to make them safer?

•  How can community leaders intervene in high-crime communities and prevent gun violence before it takes innocent lives?

•  What is the best way to intervene in personal crises to prevent suicides?

•  What is the best way to prevent and respond to mass shootings?

The federal government should invest at least $10 million in gun safety research. This should be as obvious as pumping far greater sums into a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.

Even the original author of the research restriction, the late representative Jay Dickey, had a change of heart about the ban and had urged Congress to allow federal funding for gun studies. “Research could have been continued on gun violence without infringing on the rights of gun owners, in the same fashion that the highway industry continued its research without eliminating the automobile … it is my position that somehow or some way we should slowly but methodically fund such research until a solution is reached,” he told reporters in 2017. “Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution.”³