Editorial

Seeking Scientific Common Ground, Even On Guns
by Richard A. Lovett

Every time a mass shooting hits the news, the discussion cycles through the same debate. One side calls for tighter controls. The other doubles down on the right to bear arms or the need for more “good guys” with guns. It’s like a mash-up of “Groundhog Day” and the ancient philosophical question of “what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” Answer: endless repetition of nothing useful.

But does it have to be that way?

Until recently, federal law restricted the type of research public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control can do to address this problem. That’s changing, but it never stopped academic researchers from probing this most polarizing of issues, and their findings suggest that while data-driven research can’t eliminate the current impasse, it might produce enough agreement to allow at least some degree of progress. And if this type of progress is possible on gun policy, why not on other issues as well?

Tall order? Yes. But the only way out of endless deadlock is to look for the small points on which we can agree—and by doing so, to realize that there really are things on which most of us, at least, can truly agree.

But for that, we need data-driven research.

In the case of guns, it starts with looking at what happens when people buy guns for self-defense. There are, of course, times when that makes perfect sense. As a law student, I once worked with an attorney involved in a child-custody case that drew enough death threats that even though he came from an anti-gun background, he kept a gun in his desk. Sometimes, the need for self-defense is a no-brainer.

But there are also concerns that buying a gun for self-defense can be counterproductive, particularly if the gun is kept in the home, not an office desk. It’s an issue that’s simmered for years, buried in the pro-gun/anti-gun debate. Then in 2022, a team led by David Studdert, who holds a joint appointment in law and medicine at Stanford University, published a paper in Annals of Internal Medicine that proved it rather convincingly.1

Studdert’s team took advantage of the fact that California requires gun buyers to provide their addresses when buying guns. They then compared those addresses to the ones of subsequent shootings, and (even after controlling for the overall dangerousness of the neighborhoods) found that people living in households that bought guns were 2.33 times more likely to die from gun violence than those in nearby households that didn’t buy a gun. The victim, adds John Donohue, an economist and law professor also at Stanford, “was typically the wife or domestic partner of the guy who bought the gun.”

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I should note that I myself am not inherently anti-gun. I’ve shot skeet, fired a .75-caliber flintlock rifle, target shot with a .22, carried a large-bore rifle for bear protection, and even done a summer biathlon (in which you run, rather than ski). My grandfather kept a loaded .22 above his back door, which he sometimes carried with him on morning chores in the hope of reducing the population of rabbits plaguing his Iowa farm. But I do think that Studdert’s research indicates that if you have a gun in your house (especially, a handgun), there is a risk that someone, in a fit of anger, will grab it and do something bad. It’s not about the gun, per se, but the opportunity for unchecked impulse.

A more difficult question is trying to determine if gun laws have any meaningful impact on gun violence. The leading nonpartisan assessments of this come from the RAND Corporation, which has periodically rated the evidence for various gun-control measures on a five-point scale ranging from “no data” to “supportive.”

After years of waffling, RAND published a January 2023 report2 concluding that there was supportive evidence (its highest level) that three types of gun-policy measures truly matter. One reduced gun violence. The other two increased it.

The one that reduced it? Restrictions on children’s access to parents’ firearms. The two that increased it? Stand-your-ground laws and permissive concealed-carry laws.

The reasons for the first two are fairly obvious. Nothing good comes from children playing with guns. And whatever your feelings about stand-your-ground laws, they do give permission to pull the trigger when you feel threatened, even if you could otherwise flee. That’s their purpose.

But why do permissive concealed-carry laws have the same effect? One could argue it’s like the risks of having a gun around the house: easy access might make for greater use. But when Donohue’s team compared data from states that recently adopted permissive concealed-carry laws to those that didn’t, they found a more banal contributor: thieves. “Gun thefts rise very substantially when right-to-carry laws go into effect,” Donohue says. In fact, his data shows that right-to-carry laws may be infusing an extra 100,000 stolen guns into the criminal world every year.3

A big part of the problem appears to be that when people choose not to carry their guns (or go to places where they can’t), they leave them in their cars . . . which are all-too-often unlocked. “We have information about gangs telling 12-year-old kids to go through parking lots and collect guns from unlocked cars,” Donohue says. To put it in the simplest possible terms: “yikes.” I grew up in an era when ranchers and farmers commonly had gun racks in the back window of their pickup trucks. There is a reason you don’t see many of those, these days.

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So far, we’ve been talking about pretty traditional types of social science research, largely based on using the fifty states as fifty laboratories whose policies can then be compared to gain broader insights. But in today’s world, there is another rich source of data for those with the tools to mine it: the internet and social media.

One researcher delving into this is Maurizio Porfiri of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.

Porfiri got his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech, site of a 2007 mass shooting that killed 32 and wounded 17, several of whom had been his friends and colleagues.4 Trying to find a meaningful way to respond, he realized that he could use his engineering background to approach the problem with a type of math never used before. The National Science Foundation agreed, and with funding from it, he was off and running.

The results have been interesting and informative.

It has long been known, for example, that gun sales often soar in the wake of highly publicized mass shootings. But why?

An obvious answer is that people are afraid of becoming the next victim. But in a 2020 paper in the journal Patterns.5 Porfiri’s team found a different answer. “We looked at this triangle [of data],” he says.

On one side were mass shootings. On another, media coverage of them. On the third, the number of new gun purchases. When his team put it all together, he says, the factor that mattered turned out not to be fear of becoming the next victim, but fear of new laws that might restrict your ability to buy a gun in the future. I.e., the louder people call for gun control, the more guns others will buy, especially in swing states where there is a real risk that gun-control laws might tighten. “I live in New York,” Porfiri says. “New York has so many laws that if they talk about regulation, nobody cares much.”

More recently, Porfiri’s team turned their mathematical eyes on one of the deadliest and most attention-grabbing types of mass shootings: those conducted by people whose primary goal is fame. In a 2023 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,6 they examined 55 years’ worth of headline-grabbing mass shootings, looking for the factors that distinguished fame-seekers from those with other motivations, such as personal grudges.

The math is complex, but the result fairly straightforward. Fame-seekers tend to target unexpected victims in unusual settings, in a search for what Porfiri calls surprisal. “They are searching [for] fame by innovation,” he says. The antidote? Don’t give them the fame they are seeking. “No notoriety,” Porfiri says. That means not just minimizing use of the shooter’s name, but revealing as little about the attack as possible. “Given that they are seeking fame by innovation,” Porfiri says, “you don’t want to go into too many details.”

For media and a public clamoring to know what happened and why, of course, that is anathema. But if you want to reduce the incentive for future fame-seeking attacks, Porfiri says, it’s what the research shows.

 

Which means we now have four simple things that appear to be strongly supported by the science:

• Keeping guns away from children is important, and laws designed to achieve this work.
• Permissive right-to-carry laws increase the risk of gun theft.
• Media of all types need to realize that the more fame they give today’s fame-seeking mass shooter, the more they inspire the next.
• And, like it or not, bringing a gun into our homes carries risks to those we live with.

What we do about these things is open to debate. The easiest to address is probably kids playing with guns. As I noted above, nothing good can come from that. It might also be fairly easy to deal with the problem of gun theft in right-to-carry states. Maybe all that’s needed is a reminder to first-time gun purchasers. Would you put your wallet in the glove box of an unlocked car? If not, why do it with a gun?

Dealing with fame-seeking mass shooters is probably more difficult, because in the news game everyone wants to be the first, with the most. But how many clicks is the next life worth? Including, it should be added, clicks on our own social media accounts, because in today’s world, we all are the media. Don’t give fame-seekers fame. That’s something we all can do.

The last issue is the most difficult, but maybe we can think of it this way: In his long-running radio program, “A Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor always ended his monolog with “and that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” We laughed, because we knew that statistically that couldn’t be true. Except . . .

In 2018, the American Automobile Association (AAA) asked drivers to assess their own abilities. Seventy-three percent overall (and 80% of men) rated themselves as better than average.7 The same bias may well apply to people who bring guns into their homes (or, for that matter, get them for concealed carry in right-to-carry states). We all think we are better than average. But here’s a depressing statistic. When you count suicides, there were 48,830 gun deaths in the US in 2021.8 The same year, there were 42,915 traffic deaths.9 Could it be that when it comes to gun safety we are actually worse than we are at driving?

Footnotes:

1   “Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016,” David M. Studdert, et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, June 2022, https://www.doi.org/10.7326/M21-3762. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3762

2   “Gun Policy Research Review,” Rand Corporation, https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis.html.

3   “Why Does Right-to-Carry Cause Violent Crime to Increase?” John J. Donohue, et al. NBER Working Paper No. 30190. June 2022, Revised June 2023. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30190/w30190.pdf

4   “How mapping America’s “firearm ecosystem” could help lead to gun violence solutions,” Cara Tabachnick, May 12, 2023, CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gun-violence-firearms-research-maurizio-porfiri/

5   “Self-Protection versus Fear of Stricter Firearm Regulations: Examining the Drivers of Firearm Acquisitions in the Aftermath of a Mass Shooting,” Maurizio Porfiri, et al. Patterns, August 11, 2020, https://www.doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2020.10008.

6   “Fame through surprise: How fame-seeking mass shooters diversify their attacks,” Rayan Succar, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 8, 2023, https://www.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216972120.

7   “More Americans Willing to Ride in Fully Self-Driving Cars,” Ellen Edmonds, January 24, 2018, https://www.newsroom.aaa.com/2018/01/americans-willing-ride-fully-self-driving-cars/.

8   “Most firearm deaths are suicides,” USA Facts. https://usafacts.org/data-projects/firearms-suicides

9   “U.S. traffic deaths in 2021 jump to highest number since 2005,” David Shepardson, May 17, 2022, Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-traffic-deaths-jump-105-2021-highest-number-since-2005-2022-05-17/

Richard A. Lovett studied astrophysics as an undergrad, but then got a law degree and a Ph.D. in economics. Since then (after a brief career in academia and consulting) he’s used that exotic combination mostly as a science writer and policy analyst for a Who’s Who of newspapers and science magazines. But every now and then he encounters a line of research, like that discussed here, that reminds him of his past. “If I’d stayed in academia, it’s the type of stuff I could have been doing,” he says. This is his 206th appearance in Analog.

9 “U.S. traffic deaths in 2021 jump to highest number since 2005,” David Shepardson, May 17, 2022, Reuters

 

Copyright © 2025 Richard A. Lovett