Harry Tuttle
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New Book Says Science Provides Answers to Gun Violence
4/1/2004
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
In the preface to his new book, "Private Guns, Public Health," David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health tells a story about the goose problem that had befallen the municipality of Mamaroneck, NY in the early 1990s. A growing population of Canadian geese had set up continuous residence in one of the town's parks, and their droppings atop sidewalks, fields, and beach had become a public nuisance. In response, the village leaders obtained a federal permit to let hunters take care of the problem. At the last moment, though, someone came up with a plan that the village decided to try before allowing the shooting to commence. They hired a dog trainer with a couple of border collies to chase the birds away. The plan worked and no shots were fired.
To Hemenway, the small tale demonstrates a larger American truth. "For me, the story illustrates an important point--the immediate reaction to a problem for many people in the United States is to get a gun," he writes. "Yet it turns out that this response can often exacerbate the problem, while other actions may be far more effective."
With his new book, which is published by the University of Michigan Press and scheduled for release in April, Hemenway is seeking to inject a similar dose of common sense into a debate that is too often driven by politics and ideology instead of science. Hemenway directs the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, whose mission is to reduce injury of all kinds in the U.S. by sound scientific research. So it was natural, he explained in a recent interview, that he would develop an interest in gun violence.
Hemenway started looking at existing research on gun injuries in the early 1990s, at a time when gun violence was skyrocketing in the U.S. and drawing ever closer to the annual death toll on the nation's highways. But where a vast body of knowledge existed about car death and injury and their causes, Hemenway saw that little had been done with gun-injury research. "So I felt that by doing research on guns I'd be contributing a lot to scientific knowledge," he said.
Other public-health professionals and other institutions identified the same paucity, and during most of the 1990s and continuing to today a significant body of research on gun violence has been compiled. While the published research findings have grown into a formidable body of work, there hadn't been a book that really summarizes its best parts until now.
"I didn't think there was a good synopsis, from the public-health standpoint, of all the research that has been done," he said. "The two things I tried to do in the book were to summarize the public-health literature about guns and to give people an understanding of what the public-health approach means, as applied to guns, since most people have no understanding of what that is."
Essentially, said Hemenway, the public-health approach to gun violence means that the problem is not to be examined as a crime issue, but as an injury-prevention issue. And it deals with populations instead of individuals. "The question is not, 'Why did John kill Joe?' It's 'Why are there 30,000 gun deaths annually year after year in the U.S.?' It's 'Why are there more gun deaths in Louisiana than Massachusetts every year?'"
In recent years, public-health researchers on gun violence have produced a variety of findings that shed seemingly useful light on causes and effects. For instance, Hemenway pointed out, "all evidence" shows that a gun in the home increases occupants' chances of dying as a victim of homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting. "All the data" are consistent in finding that geographic areas and populations with greater gun inventories experience greater rates of gun death. And research on concealed-carry laws shows that there is no evidence to support the claim that they reduce crime and violence, he said.
Even though the science may be clear on these points and others, Hemenway is the first to admit that the findings haven't had much impact yet on public policy. But he also points out that change often comes slowly. "One can ask, 'Why didn't public-health thinking do very well with motor vehicles and tobacco for years and years?' It just takes a while. You just need more and more science to change attitudes."
Furthermore, Hemenway said, even broad consensus doesn't mean that a public-health danger will be immediately rectified. He points to smoking as an example. "Twenty years ago, If you'd have said that all flights would be smoke-free, that there would be no smoking at your workplace, that the numbers of adolescents smoking would be decreasing, people would have looked at you and said, 'That's not going to happen.'" With tobacco, he said, the critical point arrived with the accumulating evidence that smokers endanger more people than themselves.
A unique obstacle to the achievement of sensible gun policies, however, is the almost sacred mystique attached to guns by a fervent minority of Americans. "There is this perception that the American flag is wrapped around guns, where it's not wrapped around cars in the same way," Hemenway said. "But in public health, guns and cars and tobacco are just consumer products. And we should have reasonable regulations of all these products."
Guns were specifically exempted from regulation when the Consumer Product Safety Commission was formed in 1972. But Hemenway proposes that some federal agency -- whether it be existing or new -- should be empowered to regulate firearms as consumer products in the same way that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was given power by Congress in 1970 to set and enforce safety standards for motor vehicles.
Hemenway and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center have already initiated an effort to build the kind of broad and uniform injury-reporting system used to guide NHTSA's decision-making. In 1999, the Center received foundation funding to begin a model National Violent Injury Statistics System, to collect data on all violent deaths to assist in developing policies to reduce them. The plan gained support from important people like the surgeon general and important organizations like the American Medical Association, and last September Congress allocated $3 million to the Centers for Disease Control to develop a similar program in 13 states. Several more will be added this year.
The gun lobby has already successfully leaned on Congress, as it did in 1997, to take away CDC money for data-collection projects it considers "anti-gun." And Hemenway is well aware that sensible firearms regulation will ultimately be dependent on the political will of elected leaders in Washington to enact it. But he's a man of science, not politics. The answer, he believes, is more research that builds upon what he and other public-health professionals have started in the last decade.
"I hope my book is one step toward changing public attitude," he said. "Instead of having debates without data, we want to be able to say, 'Here's research; here's science. Now let's figure out what makes the most sense.' So in the long run, it's one step. And it's from the scientific point of view; not the political point of view."
His goal for the book, he said, is to make America a better place. "Guns are an enormous problem in the Unites States. It's very different here than in any other high-income country. But most people don't understand that we don't have to accept these levels of lethal violence. It's not that we're more criminal than other countries and it's not that we're more violent. Where we're really different is our lethal violence, and it's mostly gun violence. Guns not only kill people and maim people; they destroy neighborhoods. They make people afraid. And that changes people's lives."
To learn more about this resource and for ordering information, click here.
This article is online at http://www.jointogether.org/z/0,2522,570165,00.html
4/1/2004
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
In the preface to his new book, "Private Guns, Public Health," David Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health tells a story about the goose problem that had befallen the municipality of Mamaroneck, NY in the early 1990s. A growing population of Canadian geese had set up continuous residence in one of the town's parks, and their droppings atop sidewalks, fields, and beach had become a public nuisance. In response, the village leaders obtained a federal permit to let hunters take care of the problem. At the last moment, though, someone came up with a plan that the village decided to try before allowing the shooting to commence. They hired a dog trainer with a couple of border collies to chase the birds away. The plan worked and no shots were fired.
To Hemenway, the small tale demonstrates a larger American truth. "For me, the story illustrates an important point--the immediate reaction to a problem for many people in the United States is to get a gun," he writes. "Yet it turns out that this response can often exacerbate the problem, while other actions may be far more effective."
With his new book, which is published by the University of Michigan Press and scheduled for release in April, Hemenway is seeking to inject a similar dose of common sense into a debate that is too often driven by politics and ideology instead of science. Hemenway directs the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, whose mission is to reduce injury of all kinds in the U.S. by sound scientific research. So it was natural, he explained in a recent interview, that he would develop an interest in gun violence.
Hemenway started looking at existing research on gun injuries in the early 1990s, at a time when gun violence was skyrocketing in the U.S. and drawing ever closer to the annual death toll on the nation's highways. But where a vast body of knowledge existed about car death and injury and their causes, Hemenway saw that little had been done with gun-injury research. "So I felt that by doing research on guns I'd be contributing a lot to scientific knowledge," he said.
Other public-health professionals and other institutions identified the same paucity, and during most of the 1990s and continuing to today a significant body of research on gun violence has been compiled. While the published research findings have grown into a formidable body of work, there hadn't been a book that really summarizes its best parts until now.
"I didn't think there was a good synopsis, from the public-health standpoint, of all the research that has been done," he said. "The two things I tried to do in the book were to summarize the public-health literature about guns and to give people an understanding of what the public-health approach means, as applied to guns, since most people have no understanding of what that is."
Essentially, said Hemenway, the public-health approach to gun violence means that the problem is not to be examined as a crime issue, but as an injury-prevention issue. And it deals with populations instead of individuals. "The question is not, 'Why did John kill Joe?' It's 'Why are there 30,000 gun deaths annually year after year in the U.S.?' It's 'Why are there more gun deaths in Louisiana than Massachusetts every year?'"
In recent years, public-health researchers on gun violence have produced a variety of findings that shed seemingly useful light on causes and effects. For instance, Hemenway pointed out, "all evidence" shows that a gun in the home increases occupants' chances of dying as a victim of homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting. "All the data" are consistent in finding that geographic areas and populations with greater gun inventories experience greater rates of gun death. And research on concealed-carry laws shows that there is no evidence to support the claim that they reduce crime and violence, he said.
Even though the science may be clear on these points and others, Hemenway is the first to admit that the findings haven't had much impact yet on public policy. But he also points out that change often comes slowly. "One can ask, 'Why didn't public-health thinking do very well with motor vehicles and tobacco for years and years?' It just takes a while. You just need more and more science to change attitudes."
Furthermore, Hemenway said, even broad consensus doesn't mean that a public-health danger will be immediately rectified. He points to smoking as an example. "Twenty years ago, If you'd have said that all flights would be smoke-free, that there would be no smoking at your workplace, that the numbers of adolescents smoking would be decreasing, people would have looked at you and said, 'That's not going to happen.'" With tobacco, he said, the critical point arrived with the accumulating evidence that smokers endanger more people than themselves.
A unique obstacle to the achievement of sensible gun policies, however, is the almost sacred mystique attached to guns by a fervent minority of Americans. "There is this perception that the American flag is wrapped around guns, where it's not wrapped around cars in the same way," Hemenway said. "But in public health, guns and cars and tobacco are just consumer products. And we should have reasonable regulations of all these products."
Guns were specifically exempted from regulation when the Consumer Product Safety Commission was formed in 1972. But Hemenway proposes that some federal agency -- whether it be existing or new -- should be empowered to regulate firearms as consumer products in the same way that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was given power by Congress in 1970 to set and enforce safety standards for motor vehicles.
Hemenway and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center have already initiated an effort to build the kind of broad and uniform injury-reporting system used to guide NHTSA's decision-making. In 1999, the Center received foundation funding to begin a model National Violent Injury Statistics System, to collect data on all violent deaths to assist in developing policies to reduce them. The plan gained support from important people like the surgeon general and important organizations like the American Medical Association, and last September Congress allocated $3 million to the Centers for Disease Control to develop a similar program in 13 states. Several more will be added this year.
The gun lobby has already successfully leaned on Congress, as it did in 1997, to take away CDC money for data-collection projects it considers "anti-gun." And Hemenway is well aware that sensible firearms regulation will ultimately be dependent on the political will of elected leaders in Washington to enact it. But he's a man of science, not politics. The answer, he believes, is more research that builds upon what he and other public-health professionals have started in the last decade.
"I hope my book is one step toward changing public attitude," he said. "Instead of having debates without data, we want to be able to say, 'Here's research; here's science. Now let's figure out what makes the most sense.' So in the long run, it's one step. And it's from the scientific point of view; not the political point of view."
His goal for the book, he said, is to make America a better place. "Guns are an enormous problem in the Unites States. It's very different here than in any other high-income country. But most people don't understand that we don't have to accept these levels of lethal violence. It's not that we're more criminal than other countries and it's not that we're more violent. Where we're really different is our lethal violence, and it's mostly gun violence. Guns not only kill people and maim people; they destroy neighborhoods. They make people afraid. And that changes people's lives."
To learn more about this resource and for ordering information, click here.
This article is online at http://www.jointogether.org/z/0,2522,570165,00.html
:banghead: 
