Short Wave - What Research Says About Mass Shootings

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Parkland, Fla. Buffalo, NY. Uvalde, Texas. Every mass shooting in the U.S. raises calls for better policies to prevent such tragedies. There's evidence suggesting that certain kinds of laws may reduce deaths from mass shootings, say scientists who study the field — but those policy options are not the ones usually discussed in the wake of these events. Furthermore, the amount of resources devoted to studying gun violence is paltry compared to its public health impact.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Buffalo, New York, Yvaldi, Texas. These towns have now been added to the growing list of places that have had deadly mass shootings. You know, honestly, it's hard to even tune into the news right now. It just feels excruciating, especially because everyone knows it's just a matter of time before the next mass shooting

and the next town's name added to that list. But we hear it shortwave, wanted to dig into that sense of inevitability. And we wanted to ask, does science tell us anything about how to prevent mass shootings? There is some research on this, but not a lot. And you would know, Nell Greenfield-Boyce, as NPR science correspondent, you've been covering gun violence research for some time. Yep, I have.

So tell me more about that. Mass shootings get a lot of attention from the news media, but they don't get all that much attention from scientists. Well, the problem is there's really just so little gun violence research in general. And that's because of a lack of funding over the last quarter century. And I'm guessing that's because government agencies have shied away from this research because of all the politics around guns. Yeah. Like in 1996, Congress told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to use any of its funds to, quote, advocate or promote gun control, unquote. It's not really totally clear what that meant, but it had a real chilling effect.

I was recently talking to Mike Anestis. He's executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University. There's money out there, but it is really far below where it should be given the amount of injury and death and economic costs associated with gun violence. It's just disproportionately underfunded. And he says, if you look at the 40,000 or so people killed. by guns every year in the U.S., less than 1% of those people die in mass shooting events. They're horrific. They are all too common. And yet, it's just the very tip of the iceberg, right? So he says gun violence researchers tend to focus on other types of gun violence, like suicide. The majority of people

killed by guns in this country die by suicide. Mass shooting research is a very small portion of gun violence research. Fair enough, but you said there has been some research looking specifically at mass shootings. What is it to say about prevention? There are definitely research findings that point to some gun laws as being possibly more effective than others. And interestingly, these policies are not the ones that usually get floated in the national conversation in the wake of a mass shooting event. Today on the show, let's talk about what might actually do something to stop this kind of violence. and why some scientists are optimistic that gun violence research is starting to get the support it needs. I'm Aaron Scott.

I'm Nell Greenfield Boyce. And this is Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Let's start with the basics. What is the official definition of a mass shooting? You'd think there'd be one, but there's not. Okay. It's often defined as any shooting with four or more victims. Sometimes the shooter is included in those four deaths.

if the shooter dies, sometimes not included. Sometimes there's a distinction between public mass shootings versus mass shootings that, you know, would occur, for example, in a home. So there's no standard definition in the research. And it seems hard to do research without like a shared starting point. So when we think of science, we think of experiments. But how could someone do an experiment that would say something about mass shootings, however they're defined? You can't really do an experiment. but what researchers can do is compare places in this country that have different gun laws.

I was talking about this with Daniel Webster. He's co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. And he told me that gun laws vary a lot from state to state. That is honestly less than ideal from a public safety standpoint, but it does provide researchers with opportunities. Even though they don't have full information. about everything besides gun laws that might affect differences in gun violence from state to state. I mean, they can get data on some stuff like unemployment and alcohol consumption. Alcohol consumption, really?

They can track that? Yeah, from alcohol taxes. So they can get creative and look at a lot of things, but they don't have total knowledge of stuff like gang activity or illegal drug markets. I have to sort of acknowledge that this is a really hard and frankly, in exact science. Still, a couple years back, Webster and some colleagues looked at over three decades of data on shootings in the U.S. that involved four or more victims. We did find two policies that had significant protective effects in lowering rates of fatal mass

shootings. What were those two policies? One was a requirement that a gun purchaser go through a licensing process. A licensing process requires someone to, you know, directly apply. and engage with law enforcement, sometimes our safety training and other requirements. He says licensing is actually linked to a decrease in all kinds of gun violence in their studies, homicide, suicides, shootings of cops, and also mass shootings. Okay, so that's licensing.

What's the other policy that was linked to fewer mass shooting deaths? It was state bans on buying large capacity magazines or ammunition feeding devices for semi-automatic weapons. Webster told me, this makes sense. because the greater ammo capacity that you have in a semi-automatic firearm, the more bullets you can fire uninterrupted in a short amount of time. But if a shooter has to stop and reload, victims could escape or fight back. Other researchers have also found this. I talked with David Hemingway. He's director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

He and some colleagues did a study looking at the effect of banning large capacity magazines. The states which had bans did much better in terms of having fewer mass shootings, and the mass shootings that occurred were much less lethal in terms of a number of people dying. So, Nell, you said earlier that these policies aren't the ones that usually get the most detention right after a mass shooting. So what typically do researchers see in terms of the public calls for action? Comprehensive background checks is a big one. Daniel Webster told me it wasn't linked to a decrease in. in mass shooting deaths in his research. He also told me that right after a shooting, people often call for more good guys with guns.

You know, they call for laws that would make it easier for people to carry guns around, to defend themselves if a mass shooting happened. Well, guess what? The data do not bear that out at all. If anything, it shows higher rates of fatal mass shootings in response to weaker regulations for concealed carry by civilians. Okay, so we've covered a few different kinds of policies here. Are there any others we haven't mentioned that are supported by research? There's so-called red flag laws that allow police officers to temporarily take guns away from people who seem to be in imminent danger.

Those are relatively new. But one study in California, looking at the use of this over a two-year period, found 21 cases of the process being used because someone threatens to commit a mass shooting. Several of those threats involved schools. But a study like that cannot prove that taking away a person's guns prevented a mass shooting, right? I mean, you can't prove a negative. No. And the researchers explicitly said in their study, you know, what the limitations were. Still, given the overall lack of information here, gun violence experts say that was an important finding about how such laws could get used in the context of mass shooting threats. And then there's the issue of age restrictions.

Yeah, yeah. The shooter in Yuvaldi purchased semi-automatic weapons right after he turned 18, as I understand it. Yeah, Webster told me, The peak ages for violent offending with firearms is roughly 18 to 21. So would age restrictions make it harder for young adults to access weapons capable of creating a mass shooting? Mike Anestis told me they might, but... Do we have large, data-based resources to evaluate those policies? No, we don't.

Yeah, this makes it hard when people are looking for evidence-based answers when it comes to guns. There's just not so much science because there's been relatively little funding for so long. It really is kind of amazing. I mean, there was this one study in 2017 that compared the levels of gun violence research funding to funding for other public health threats and causes of death. Take sepsis. So that's this life-threatening response you can get to infections. It kills about the same amount of people as guns.

do every year. This study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that gun violence research funding was less than 1% of the funding given to sepsis research. Less than 1%. That would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. Yeah. Those researchers found that gun violence was the least researched cause of death. But David Hemingway told me, just in recent years, the field has started to pick up. There's been a tremendous increase in interest. among scholars about trying to figure out what's happening with guns. It used to be five years ago, once every three months I'd be asked to review a paper about guns. Now it's like every week.

What does David think is driving that change? I asked him that. He wasn't sure. He thought some of the mass shootings had an effect. He mentioned Parkland. That was the shooting at a Florida high school that killed 17 people. He said there has been more funding. Private sources are kicking some in. There's state funding.

and in the last few years, Congress has loosened up their past restrictions on the CDC. Lawmakers even gave some money to that agency and the National Institutes of Health for gun violence research. It was like $25 million. It's like there's been a huge percentage increase in federal funding and availability of funds. Just to be clear, he's laughing there because the percentage has gone up, but the total amount is still very small compared to the chaos that guns cause. Yeah. So there's not a lot of money for research. But the CDC does issue reports on gun violence.

There was one just the other week on the dramatic increase in gun homicides during the first year of the pandemic. Yeah, I covered that one. The agency does track statistics. And the current head of the CDC said that the school shooting in Yuvaldi was, quote, a reminder that gun violence is a serious public health threat that must be addressed, unquote. As horrible as mass shootings are, though, they all. are just one kind of gun violence. When I was talking to Mike Anestis, he said, yes, we need to talk about mass shootings. He said the one in Euvaldi filled his brain so that he could think of nothing else.

This conversation is necessary and should happen as frequently as people are willing to have it. But man, I hope also folks realize how many people have already died of gun violence since this horrific tragedy happened and will die every single day. We have to talk about that. People have to understand the scope and nature of gun violence in America in order for there to be a proper demand for the solutions we need to the problem. Every day, more than 100 people are shot and killed in the United States. Guns have become the leading cause of death for kids over the age of one year. Guns kill more kids and adolescents than car crashes do. Yeah, there was more than a dozen mass shootings just over Memorial Day weekend in the few days since the shooting in Evaldi.

Now, thank you for bringing us this look at gun violence research and where it stands, even if I wish we didn't need to have this kind of research at all. Yeah, me too. Thanks for having me on the show. Today's episode was produced by Margaret Serino, who also checked the facts. It was edited by Will Stone, Rebecca Ramirez, and our senior supervising editor, Giselle Grayson. Trey Watson was the audio engineer.

I'm Aaron Scott. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast. podcast from NPR.