Chicago Gun Violence Is An Understudied Public Health Dilemma

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jan 4, 2017 4:34PM

Gun violence is most often talked about in terms of law enforcement, but gun deaths should be framed in terms of public health, even as funding for research on gun violence falls far short of other major causes of death, according to a study published on Tuesday.

The report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, studied some thousands of gun victims in Chicago, among a larger set of some 138,000 people, over eight years, from 2006 and 2014. The study found that gun violence “follows an epidemic-like process of social contagion that is transmitted through networks by social interactions.” For example, shooting victims were more likely to have an association with another shooting victim at a rate almost twice as high as that of a non-victim.

The study argues that violence should be treated from a “public-health approach.” “Concerted efforts should focus on making gun violence prevention efforts [victim]-focused rather than offender-focused by prioritizing the health and safety of those in harm’s way,” the study said.

But at the same time, scholars found that the necessary research that might assist health-based intervention programs is in short supply compared to other causes of death.

Researchers wrote:

“Gun violence killed about as many individuals as sepsis. However, funding for gun violence research was about 0.7% of that for sepsis and publication volume about 4%. In relation to mortality rates, gun violence research was the least-researched cause of death and the second-least funded cause of death after falls.”

Journal of the American Medical Association

One of the main reasons gun violence research is so lacking is due to legal preventions. “For two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been prevented from allocating funding that could be used to advocate for or promote gun control,” wrote the Washington Post. “Although that doesn't explicitly exclude all research on gun violence, it is said to have had a chilling effect on funding.” So the legislative (and political) roadblock may first have to be cleared before the necessary academic one can.