A Few Gun Facts

On Monday, just after the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, this issue of Discover magazine landed in my mailbox.

From its cover story I learned:

A 2017 JAMA study estimates that for every death due to firearms, the U.S. spends about $63 on research into the topic. In contrast, research spending on motor vehicle deaths is about $1,000 per fatality.

And before you start thinking we spend a lot of R&D money on motor vehicle deaths (which kill about 40,000 people a year, similar to the number of deaths from guns), check out this chart, which shows those two numbers compared to research money spent on other causes of death. Note that these numbers are shown on an order-of-magnitude scale:


The red $63 outlier at far left on the chart is gun violence research; motor vehicles are the third lowest number. But we spend more money, sometimes a lot more money, on intestinal infections, diabetes, hypertension, liver disease, aspiration, Parkinson's, and — of course — HIV, which blows all the other dollar amounts out of the water. (In case the chart is hard to read, the median amount spent is $4,852, so that puts both the gun and motor vehicle spending into context. I wonder what the median would be without the HIV spending?)

Another graph compared the suicide rate by firearm to the rate by other means across a large list of OECD countries. The U.S., of course, has the highest rate by firearm (6.9 per 100,000), but what surprised me was that the total U.S. suicide rate (13.8 per 100,000) was nowhere near the highest. Countries like Finland and Switzerland came close to us, and we were topped by France, Poland, Austria, Estonia, Belgium, and Slovenia, not to mention Japan — so often mentioned as having almost no gun deaths of any type — which has 18.4 suicides from non-gun deaths per 100,000.

One bit of research that did manage to happen, despite the low level of spending, had this positive outcome:

In January [2019], the American Journal of Public Health published a study on gun violence in some of Philadelphia's high-crime neighborhoods. Researchers divided more than 100 geographic clusters of vacant, blighted lots into three randomly selected groups. Within each group, the vacant land received either light intervention (trash was collected and grass mowed), significant intervention (the lots were transformed into park-like settings with trees and new grass) or no intervention.

The experiment lasted nearly two years, and researchers found a significant reduction in gun violence in the geographic clusters with vacant land that had been improved in any way. What's more, there was no evidence that shooting incidents moved from those improved clusters to adjacent ones. 

That's a result that should be widely known.