Repeal the Dickey Amendment to Address Polarization Surrounding Firearms in the United States

Forces against the funding blockade put in place by the Dickey Amendment in 1996 have grown more vocal over recent years. After two decades of relative silence, many of the nation’s leading public health organizations, medical groups, and research universities have now come out against the research ban. Meanwhile, each successive mass shooting highlights the untenable tensions between public demand for expert knowledge to prevent gun death on the one hand and a government actively engaged in squelching this exact expert knowledge on the other. One would hope that it is only a matter of time before Dickey becomes too much of a liability for the politicians who support the silencer it places on public safety.

What might such a sea change mean for public health? Lifting Dickey would ideally produce scenarios in which major funding agencies could support epidemiological research on firearm injury and death in the same ways that they do other vectors of morbidity and mortality. This would mean more grants for investigators, national databases available to study epidemic trends of gun injury and death, and opportunities for publication. All of this would help close yawning gaps in our understandings of best firearm-related policies and practices, leading to improved population-level health.

But, if nothing else, the past decades have made clear just how deeply distinct guns and bullets are from other American vectors. The charged histories surrounding firearms in the United States has led to profound present-day political polarization and mistrust. This polarization, too, needs be an object of study, because research will fail to reach effective impact if not coupled with better understandings of the complex cultural meanings and anxieties that Americans ascribe to guns, and of the points at which conversations about best practices break down into acrimony.

DICKEY FURTHER BALKANIZED THE GUN DEBATE

For instance, public health research might study the Dickey Amendment’s effects, not just on gun policy but also on the balkanization of American conversations surrounding firearms. This is because the absence of scientific consensus or clear policy directives opened wide fissures between certain pro– and anti–gun-control positions in ways that rendered compromise increasingly unimaginable, while pushing differing camps into potentially self-defeating stances.

Supporters of the ban often contend that funding restrictions are needed to block a “public health bias” or “tainted public health model” that inexorably advocates gun control.¹ To be sure, no profession is without bias—this is the reason for blinded, peer-reviewed research. Yet this stance has often led to mistrust of knowledge about gun safety and best practices most salient, not in ivory tower institutions or liberal coastal cities, but in red-state communities where there are the most guns and the greatest need for public health interventions. Here, research questions silenced by Dickey go well beyond whether to implement specific policies or limit constitutional “freedoms.” Dickey also squelched large-scale studies of value to the daily lives of people living in gun country, from best storage practices to ways to spot loved ones at risk for firearm suicide. Indeed, after Dickey, research might even assess the potential psychological benefits of owning a gun—a position espoused by many gun owners who feel “safer” when carrying—or about the kinds of public health messaging that might be most effective among gun owners.

MORE NUANCED HYPOTHESES

On the other side of the conversation, Dickey pushed gun-violence–prevention researchers into the trap of needing to prove basic or obvious hypotheses at the expense of more nuanced ones. For instance, it would hardly seem shocking from a population-level perspective that more people get shot in places where there are more guns, or that locales with basic restrictions on the purchase and carry of firearms see better health outcomes than locales that have none. These are the types of fundamental claims that gun researchers have been forced to continually validate and defend against the headwinds of a well-funded corporate lobby that counters research with provocation rather than with counterbalanced research.

Lifting the ban and properly funding research might free investigators to address questions that are counterintuitive in addition to ones that are self-evident. For instance, what common characteristics define the vast majority of gun owners who never discharge their guns in public settings and whose names thus do not show up on morbidity databases on which gun researchers have been forced to rely? Public health researchers might also be better able to study better ways to translate firearm-injury–prevention research into effective policy solutions.

EVALUATE NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION CLAIMS

Funding might also allow research fully to evaluate assertions that lie at the core of many National Rifle Association (NRA) claims in support of broad gun ownership. Would large-scale studies validate Lott’s controversial assertion that “more guns” lead to “less crime,” or would such research put this claim to rest?² Would evidence support the notion that arming teachers makes students safer? Do mass shootings represent the actions of “mentally ill” persons or failures of “mental health” systems, as GOP politicians frequently claim, or do such statements simply further stereotypes and misperceptions?³

WHITE PROTECTIONISM

Freed of the so-called ban, public health research could also pioneer new large-scale analysis of charged tensions of race surrounding American gun culture. As but one example, the NRA long posited guns as protections against oft-racialized “bad guys” such as, in the words of CEO Wayne LaPierre, thugs, terrorists, home invaders, drug cartels, and car jackers.⁴ Such language plays to histories in which guns function as symbols of White authority.⁵ Yet research is now beginning to consider the potential downside of such construction. For instance, while White men comprise the majority of American gun superowners (own more than 30 guns), White men also dominate statistics on gun suicide in ways that far exceed demographics.⁶ Might the construction of White protectionism also function as a health hazard, and what alternate modes of White communal engagement might emerge in their stead?⁷

RESHAPING CONVERSATIONS IN PRODUCTIVE WAYS

These are but a few examples of the ways that public health research might take the lead in shaping common knowledge and best practices regarding American gun ownership after Dickey. Undoubtedly, the broad array of public health methods would affect future laws and policies in ways that, one can only hope, provide safety and security for future generations. At the same time, public health research can also provide deeper understandings of the ways Americans talk, and often talk past one another, about broader tensions and divisions signified by guns. By so doing, public health research can demarcate new opportunities for common ground among communities polarized by a needlessly contentious “debate” about something for which we all strive: safety.

Part of this work undoubtedly involves better understandings of how we came to our current, complex moment—in which children participate in “mass shooter drills” in schools while grown-ups struggle to achieve basic levels of agreement about how to stop future shootings. And it also involves asking difficult questions about why we feel we need (or don’t need) so many guns in the first place, and what kind of society we create when we divide so readily into pro- or anti-, red or blue, as a result. By so doing, public health can help shape something just as important as the knowledge base about firearms: it can enable better ways to talk to, understand, and empathize with each other about matters of security and protection, and life and death.