By Todd C. Frankel
May 26 at 11:13 PMKansas has a problem: It has a law allowing teachers to carry guns in the classroom, but almost no schools are using it because insurance companies refuse to provide coverage if they do. As EMC Insurance, the largest insurer of schools in Kansas, explained in a letter to its agents, the company “has concluded that concealed handguns on school premises poses a heightened liability risk.”…
Mississippi considered such a bill this year, leading the state’s largest public school district to ask its insurer how much that would cost.
“It’s kind of a given that it’d be very, very expensive to arm people,” said Katherine Nelson, spokeswoman for the DeSoto County district. …
The reaction of insurance companies is notable because they are supposed to evaluate dangers through the dry eye of actuarial science, largely avoiding the heated emotions of the nation’s gun debate,
I see you have a tag demanding the CDC be allowed to research gun violence. Here’s the thing, the CDC is allowed to research anything related to firearms it wants. And they have; In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, President Obama issued a list of Executive Orders. Notably among them, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was given $10 million to research gun violence.
As a result, a 1996 Congressional ban on research by the CDC “to advocate or promote gun control” was lifted. Finally, anti-gun proponents—and presumably the Obama Administration—thought gun owners and the NRA would be met with irrefutable scientific evidence to support why guns make Americans less safe.
Most mainstream journalists argued the NRA’s opposition to CDC gun research demonstrated its fear of being contradicted by science; few—if any—cited why the NRA may have had legitimate concerns. The culture of the CDC at the time could hardly be described as lacking bias on firearms.
“We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes,” Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who oversaw CDC gun research, told The Washington Post in 1994. “Now [smoking] is dirty, deadly and banned.”
Does Rosenberg sound like a man who should be trusted to conduct taxpayer-funded studies on guns?
Rosenberg’s statement coincided with a CDC study by Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay, who argued guns in the home are 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member than an intruder. The study had serious flaws; namely, it skewed the ratio by failing to consider defensive uses of firearms in which the intruder wasn’t killed. It has since been refuted by several studies, including one by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, indicating Americans use guns for self-defense 2.5 million times annually. However, the damage had been done—the “43 times” myth is perhaps gun-control advocates’ most commonly cited argument, and a lot of people still believe it to this day.
So, the NRA and Congress took action. But with the ban lifted, what does the CDC’s first major gun research in 17 years reveal? Not exactly what Obama and anti-gun advocates expected. In fact, you might say Obama’s plan backfired.
Here are some key findings from the CDC report, “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,” released in June:
1. Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker:
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
2. Defensive uses of guns are common:
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
3. Mass shootings and accidental firearm deaths account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, and both are declining:
“The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” The report also notes, “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”
4. “Interventions” (i.e, gun control) such as background checks, so-called assault rifle bans and gun-free zones produce “mixed” results:
“Whether gun restrictions reduce firearm-related violence is an unresolved issue.” The report could not conclude whether “passage of right-to-carry laws decrease or increase violence crime.”
5. Gun buyback/turn-in programs are “ineffective” in reducing crime:
“There is empirical evidence that gun turn in programs are ineffective, as noted in the 2005 NRC study Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. For example, in 2009, an estimated 310 million guns were available to civilians in the United States (Krouse, 2012), but gun buy-back programs typically recover less than 1,000 guns (NRC, 2005). On the local level, buy-backs may increase awareness of firearm violence. However, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, guns recovered in the buy-back were not the same guns as those most often used in homicides and suicides (Kuhn et al., 2002).”
6. Stolen guns and retail/gun show purchases account for very little crime:
“More recent prisoner surveys suggest that stolen guns account for only a small percentage of guns used by convicted criminals. … According to a 1997 survey of inmates, approximately 70 percent of the guns used or possess by criminals at the time of their arrest came from family or friends, drug dealers, street purchases, or the underground market.”
7. The vast majority of gun-related deaths are not homicides, but suicides:
“Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.”
Why No One Has Heard This
Given the CDC’s prior track record on guns, you may be surprised by the extent with which the new research refutes some of the anti-gun movement’s deepest convictions.
Okay. I’ve got some time tonight and I’m curious. I’ll bite. I appreciate that you’re invested
and would like this topic to be understood in its subtleties.
First off, thank you for the link to the publication you cited (“Priorities
for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.” Institute
of Medicine and National Research Council. 2013. Priorities for
Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC:
The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18319). That was an interesting read and made a very
long graduation ceremony a lot more tolerable.
I’m afraid that anything after that point may be where we part ways,
however.
The Dickey Amendment:
Yes, on its face, the Dickey Amendment in the 90s doesn’t outlaw CDC
funding of research on gun violence. However, it has done so in effect.
Every individual study will have flaws. They are unavoidable. No one
study can stand on its own, but any conclusions in a field of study must be
based on the accumulation of studies whose flaws balance each other out.
Yes, Congress requires 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.” However, because of the nature
of research, and particularly the kind of naturalistic research that gun
violence studies are limited to, any and all studies that include results that
guns rights advocates do not like necessarily will have flaws and limitations
that can be used to argue that the research design was biased. Given that
Congress’ action also included a budget penalty in the exact amount that was
used to fund research into firearm injury the prior year ($2.6
million), the CDC cannot fund research on gun violence without a very high
probability of further penalty.
It affects the NIH, too:
BTW, Congress also put the same language into the appropriations
bill of 2012 affecting the use of funds by the NIH (National Institute of
Health). The NIH is THE major funding
source for medical and mental health research outside of Big Pharma.
If Congress had really intended to reduce bias
Congress had a lot of other good options for reducing bias. All
research has to be approved at multiple levels before it gets funded. For
example, if Congress really wanted to reduce bias they could have passed laws
about the composition of those bodies in the CDC and NIH that review research
proposals. But they didn’t. Instead they
crafted a law that deliberately misunderstood the scientific method, would have
a chilling effect on any research that might possibly be able to draw any
conclusions about causality in gun violence, and give those who voted for the
bill the fig leaf of plausible deniability.
.
And now to your points:
Here’s the thing, the CDC is allowed to research anything
related to firearms it wants. And they have; In the wake of the Sandy Hook
tragedy, President Obama issued a list of Executive
Orders. Notably among them, the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) was given $10 million to research gun violence.
Did Obama sign executive orders to fund CDC research after Sandy Hook? Yes.
Did research get funded and happen?
No.
Congress blocked funding of Obama’s executive orders and affirmed the language of the Dickey amendment
The CDC was not “given $10 million to research gun violence.” As of 2015,
CDC officials noted “it had commissioned an agenda of possible research goals [the committee’s publication
you cited] but still lacked the dedicated funding to pursue it. “It is possible for us to conduct
firearm-related research within the context of our efforts to address youth
violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, and suicide,” CDC spokeswoman
Courtney Lenard wrote, “but our resources are very limited.”
Why is the CDC’s resources on this topic
limited? “Congress
has continued to block dedicated funding. Obama requested $10 million for the
CDC’s gun violence research in his last two budgets.” “Both times the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives said no.” Indeed, as recently as the 2015
appropriations bill included the following language, “The
Committee reminds CDC that the longstanding general provision’s intent is to
protect rights granted by the Second Amendment. The restriction is to prevent
activity that would undertake activities (to include data collection) for
current or future research, including under the title ‘gun violence
prevention,’ that could be used in any manner to result in a future policy,
guidelines, or recommendations to limit access to guns, ammunition, or to
create a list of gun owners.“
Chilling effect above and beyond the CDC will take time to reverse
In addition, the Dickey amendment had a chilling effect on any research
on gun violence in the US. A whole
generation of researchers lack the expertise in this area because almost no one
wanted to dip their toe in the poisoned waters and fund the research. Young
researchers were warned away and established researchers moved on to other
topics in order to preserve their funding.
Even once the funding opens up, it will take another generation of
researchers learning how to work in this particular field before we even start
to catch up.
But with the ban lifted, what
does the CDC’s first major gun research in 17 years reveal? Not exactly what Obama
and anti-gun advocates expected. In fact, you might say Obama’s plan backfired.
Here
are some key findings from the CDC report, “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat
of Firearm-Related Violence,” released in June:
You should note that the committee’s report you cited is not “the CDC’s
first major gun research in 17 years,” but a review of the literature of
previously completed and published gun violence research and recommended
direction for future research. The
committee’s report was published in 2013.
The majority of research cited in the report is, unsurprisingly,
published prior to 1996.
I’m not going to address each of your points about the conclusions
reached in the committee’s 2013 report.
That would be tiresome for everyone and I have a long drive tomorrow.
Instead, let
me address the first three key findings you cited as an arbitrary sampling:
2. Defensive uses of guns are common:
“Almost
all national survey estimates indicate that defensive
gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with
estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per
year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in
2008.”
Okay, but you left out the rest of that paragraph, which states: On the other hand, some
scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive
uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The
variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of
3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small
number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former
estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not
asked specifically about defensive gun use.
That 3 million is based on very questionable statistical methods and
there is a very wide gap between 108,000 and 300,000 that is not accounted for
in the research that we have.
1. Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker:
“Studies that directly
assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which
a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening
an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims
compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
Sure, I found that passage, too.
It does sounds hopeful. However,
applying large heterogenous group statistics to individual people and
situations is fraught with risks. Just
because it lowers the risk for the group as a whole does not mean that it
lowers the risk for you, for me, and for our next-door neighbor. And so, the committee goes on to recommend on page 16,
And then further on, on page 40, the committee raises the point from
not just the one Kellermann study that was controversial, but a series of
studies from his research group point out that rates of gun violence in the
homes of gun owner is higher. That
result is countered by other research that says that it protects against
serious injury.
Note that the committee does not then conclude that having a weapon in the
home is protective when used defensively, rather that more research is needed
to drill down to why different studies are getting different results. Again, each individual study is going to be
flawed in their own way and it is the accumulation of research that is
important to inform any action taken on a field of study.
That said, even if research goes on to support the link between lower
rates of injury in people who use guns defensively, this research only
establishes a correlation. Correlation
does not mean causation. We do not know
where the causality lies. For example,
does having and using a gun to defend yourself cause your risk of injury to be
lower? Or does being a person who is
comfortable using a gun to defend yourself cause your risk of injury to be
lower? Is there an underlying variable
that cause both things: that someone is
comfortable using a gun because they simply have the mindset, confidence, and
skills to defend themselves – regardless of the weapon involved? Do less skillful assailants have a higher
rate of choosing victims that have the means to defend themselves because
they’re not picking up on the cues that this is someone who likely has a
firearm? Any of these hypotheses would
result in the statistics cited by these studies.
3. Mass shootings and accidental firearm deaths account for a
small fraction of gun-related deaths, and both are declining:
Ouch. Oh dear. Okay. I’ll agree that
this actually means anything significant for the debate on gun control when you
can say this to a family member of a mass shooting victim and expect it to comfort
them.
Please also note that this report was published in 2013. Since then there has been another spike in the
number of deaths related to mass shootings.
It is no longer true that deaths due to mass shootings are declining.
Why No One Has Heard This
Given the CDC’s prior track record on guns, you may be surprised by the extent with which the new research refutes some of the anti-gun movement’s deepest convictions.
1. Again, this report is not “new research.” It’s a review of old research and the committee’s recommendations for the directions that new research should take.
2. I think you and I are going to just have to disagree on how much this lit review refutes or supports anything. My reading of the report is that this area of study is still in its infancy. Much of the published research in this report is simply attempting to establish reasonably reliable base rates of broadly defined variables. It is nowhere near being able to support conclusions about causality or generalizability.
~.~
And so, here we are 22 years later, still in a situation in which the CDC
can only collect gun violence statistics incidental to other areas of research.
But make no mistake, they can do so because gathering statistics is NOT
research, and has even less power to support conclusions about association,
much less cause and effect than the research it funded prior to 1996.
In the end we both miss out. I’d much rather be in a situation in which
someone from your POV of being invested in gun rights and someone from my POV,
who has to deal with the broken bodies and traumatized psyches of children
exposed to violence had equal voices to battle out what research gets funded.
Let the chips fall where they may. I want solutions based on research-supported
fact, not ideology.
One roadblock to arming teachers: Insurance companies – The Washington Post
Hearseeno 