Story note: This is a companion piece to a personal story related to my father suffering from dementia in an RV with many guns. The challenges of dealing with a person suffering dementia are tremendous. The challenges of dealing with an ARMED person suffering from dementia are scary.
Please read the personal journalism piece on The Boston Globe:
My elderly father had dementia, anger issues, and many guns. What were we to do?
One underreported aspect of America’s firearms epidemic: armed seniors with memory problems. My family had few legal options for disarming our dad.
Photo by Eliezer Muller on Unsplash
American’s own as many as 400 million firearms, making guns ever-present in our society and a part of every life, directly or indirectly, with significant consequences for physical and mental health. These consequences led the U.S. Surgeon General in June to declare firearm violence in America a “public health crisis.”
The declaration presents national data on gun deaths and that data is constantly examined for every scrap of insight into who was killed, how, when and by what kind of firearm. However, federal bans on collecting and restricting access to more specific firearm data and limiting research funding has kept the many ways guns figure into our lives shrouded in darkness.
“There are so many questions that still are unanswered because of that lack of investment,” said Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, director of the Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program at the University of Washington. “Some of them are very much basic questions, such as how many people get shot and survive.”
Rowhani-Rahbar is a leading and widely published epidemiologist focusing on injury and harm caused by firearms, as well as in understanding cultural and demographic aspects of carrying and using firearms.
He told me in a recent interview that other “shortcomings” in data collection are critical details such as not knowing the number of firearms involved in crime, and where those guns came from. Or, when a firearm is involved in a crime, what actions or situational details led to a shooting? How does the presence of a firearm in a personal conflict change behavior? Under what circumstances do guns lead to a violent outcome, when otherwise violence might have been avoided?
Also, Rowhani-Rahbar said, we don’t know how many of those 400 million firearms are stored safely or who carries a gun and where, on a state-by-state or community level. Not that a great deal of effort by Rowhani-Rahbar and other epidemiologists and doctors hasn’t gone into finding these answers. Right now, however, a lot of that research involves statistical projections rather than specific data.
In the research journal JAMA, Rowhani-Rahbar and others argued in 2019 that a “thorough assessment of the effectiveness of (various) polices requires data on firearms to allow comparisons between states and over time. However, in most states, such data currently do not exist or are not available to researchers.”
The culprits in this suppression of firearm data and research are the Dickey Amendment and the Tiahrt Amendment, both federal policies pushed hard by the NRA but ultimately made law by Congress in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. Dickey (1997) blocked funding for firearm-related research, and Tiahrt (2003) blocked the ATF from keeping background check data and sharing any “trace database” information outside of law enforcement agencies, who are also prohibited from sharing that information.
However, the grip both federal policies have on firearm research and data is loosening. A February article in the journal JAMA Surgery explains that 2013 and 2018 clarifications to Dickey have resulted in a rapid increase in funding for research into firearm injury prevention. From 2017 to 2019, the researchers report, the CDC provided zero funding for grants and the NIH kicked out roughly $29 million, but from 2020 to 2022 the CDC awarded nearly $50 million and the NIH more than $100 million in research grants.
“The number of registered clinical trials and publications similarly increased, by 90% and 86%, respectively, from 2017-2019 to 2020-2022,” the researchers wrote. That funding either paid for directly or led to more than 2,000 studies, they assert.
The Tiahrt Amendment has been more resistant to change.
However in 2008 and 2010, Tiahrt was slightly loosened to allow better access by law enforcement agencies and let them share data. Also, the ATF is allowed to publish statistical reports “including total production, importation, and exportation by each licensed importer or licensed manufacturer, or statistical aggregate data regarding firearms traffickers and trafficking channels, or firearms misuse, felons, and trafficking investigations,” according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“Subject to these important exceptions,” the Gifford Center says, “the Tiahrt Amendments continue to prevent ATF from disclosing relevant data to members of the public, including researchers and litigants, for use in lawsuits against the gun industry.”
The lead author of the February JAMA Surgery study, Dr. Megan L. Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, said in a news release that their research “shows that as rates of firearm injuries and death rise in the U.S., continued federal funding is critical for supporting and facilitating rigorous research and data-driven solutions. Research helps us understand what works and helps us invest our time and money in programs that will really make a difference.”
The call for much more funding for research into gun violence was echoed by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in his June declaration. In the advisory, Murthy reinforced “the critical need to increase research funding for the improvement of data collection and analysis to inform and evaluate firearm violence prevention strategies.”
In addition to investing in data collection systems in healthcare and criminal justice, said Rowhani-Rahbar, the U.S. needs the “political will” to do it.
“I really feel like it’s a disservice to frame some of the approaches, effective approaches that we have, as approaches that are going to take people’s guns away. No, they are not. They really are not,” Rowhani-Rahbar added. “There are approaches that show how — without infringing upon the rights of individuals in the United States and responsible gun owners, which is the majority of gun owners — we could implement strategies that reduce the risk of harm [by firearms] associated with violence.”
Writer’s note: I first became aware of the issues surrounding gun violence data and research while working at the University of Washington from 2019 to 2022, where I wrote several news releases promoting studies by Rowhani-Rahbar and his fellow UW researchers. Then when my father began suffering significant symptoms of dementia, I became aware of how dangerous the presence of his guns were for him and others.
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