What Researchers Learned About Gun Violence Before Congress Killed Funding - ProPublica

What Researchers Learned About Gun Violence Before Congress Killed Funding - ProPublica

So what were you were able to find before funding got cut off?

One of the critical studies that we supported was looking at the question of whether having a firearm in your home protects you or puts you at increased risk. This was a very important question because people who want to sell more guns say that having a gun in your home is the way to protect your family.

What the research showed was not only did having a firearm in your home not protect you, but it hugely increased the risk that someone in your family would die from a firearm homicide. It increased the risk almost 300 percent, almost three times as high.

I-O police are more efficient at dispensing justice than people doing it themselves, when I-O is weak this creates more Oy-R and Y-Ro crimes. For example Oy thieves might try to secretly break into R people's homes, both are depending on being quiet and deceptive to gain or avoid losing assets. This increases with weak O policing and allowing firearms can cause both to escalate their violence, this is like escalating weapons exponentially in the cold war. there are can also be team based weapons in Y-Ro where gangs can use them, also Ro neighborhoods might have weapons with neighborhoods watch like vigilantes. There is more chance of injustices occurring here too when criminals are punished too harshly or were innocent.

It also showed that the risk that someone in your home would commit suicide went up. It went up five-fold if you had a gun in the home. These are huge, huge risks, and to just put that in perspective, we look at a risk that someone might get a heart attack or that they might get a certain type of cancer, and if that risk might be 20 percent greater, that may be enough to ban a certain drug or a certain product.

But in this case, we're talking about a risk not 20 percent, not 100 percent, not 200 percent, but almost 300 percent or 500 percent. These are huge, huge risks.

I understand there was also an effort to collect data on gun violence through something called the Firearm Injury Surveillance System. What did that involve?

We were collecting information to answer the question of who, what, where, when, and how did shootings occur?

We were finding that most homicides occur between people who know each other, people who are acquaintances or might be doing business together or might be living together. They're not stranger-on-stranger shootings. They're not mostly home intrusions.

We also found that there were a lot of firearm suicides, and in fact most firearm deaths are suicides. There were a lot of young people who were impulsive who were using guns to commit suicide.