Las Vegas and Gun Control: We're Working on the Wrong Problem

In A Few Good Men, Col. Nathan Jessup, played deliciously by Jack Nicholson, directs a subordinate to shape up a "substandard" Marine who falls behind on grueling marches. The "Code Red" he orders involves tying up PFC William Santiago and stuffing a gag in his mouth. Santiago dies as a result.

Instead of asking "why can't Santiago keep up?", Jessup asked "how do I send a message to this embarrassment of a Marine?" He picked the wrong problem to solve. Had he framed the problem correctly, he might have learned that Santiago had an underlying disease - and avoided both the young Marine's death and his own arrest.

As we confront the horror of Las Vegas, we are also framing the problem the wrong way: solely as an issue of gun control. Even if advocates of banning "bump stock" devices win, this will do little to prevent mass shootings. Even though the NRA seems supportive, this may be just a way to avoid more wide-ranging proposals about guns in America.

Framing the problem as "gun control" might help in addressing who can get new ones, but there are already as many guns as people in America, and it distracts us from asking why some Americans want guns, why some use them in violent acts, and what we can do to stop the carnage.

The answers require us to look beyond gun types, modifications, and background checks. They require understanding America's culture not just its commerce in guns. They also require scientific data, not the ideology of right and left or faulty assumptions.

For example, contrary to popular perceptions the gun homicide rate has fallen in the last forty years, from 7.0 to 3.6 per 100,000 people. This parallels a 49 percent drop in violent crime since the 1990s. Americans are statistically safer; but they don't feel safer. The most frequent reason cited for gun ownership is protection, but in 1999 it was hunting. Also contrary to popular belief, fewer Americans have guns - a drop from 51 percent of households in 1978 to 36 percent in 2016. Yet those who own guns have a lot more of them, an average of eight, more than double the number in the 1990s.

The possible reasons for these and other observations (e.g. almost all mass shooters are male and over half kill themselves; the prevalence of inner city gun violence; the fact that two-thirds of all gun deaths are suicides) demand understanding. For example, does the concern for protection reflect less faith in government, less trust in each other, more fear of terrorism? Does the prevalence of mass shootings reflect more anger in society, more violence in popular culture, more news about violent crime?

We have some research, but it is not enough. In 2005, for example, the National Academy of Sciences produced a report on Firearms and Violence. Among its major conclusions was that "Empirical research on firearms and violence has resulted in important findings that can inform policy decisions." Yet it also found that "answers to some of the most pressing questions cannot be addressed with existing data and research methods."

We are long on calls for change but short on understanding what to do. Even with better data, however, we lack the public consensus and political will to act. We need at least two changes.

First, Congress must rescind the Dickey Amendment. Authored by then-Congressman Jay Dickey, and added as a rider to the 1996 omnibus spending bill, it stipulated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control." While not technically a ban on gun violence research, in practice it has essentially silenced the CDC. The American Psychological Association, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all condemned it. Even its author, now out of Congress, regrets how it has been used. As he put it to NPR's Steve Inskeep in a 2015 interview, when asked what advice he would give to Congress about reactivating funding for research on gun violence: "As if they would listen. But the point is that they need to reactivate that fund and be specific as to what the money is to be used for."

Second, we need a strategy to act on the data we have and will learn. A multi-year National Commission on Gun Violence in America, composed of a nonpartisan group of respected public, private and non-profit individuals without axes to grind, could help. Such a group, in connection with the National Academy of Sciences, could guide a research program and make policy recommendations.

More than 30,000 Americans die every year by guns; another 70,000 are injured. America has 5 percent of the world's guns but 31 percent of its mass shootings. We owe something to all those damaged lives - and the many more of their loved ones whose lives will never be the same.