The nation has been trying to deal with high levels of gun violence for decades. Have many efforts to combat it been successful?
The Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation held a briefing on Capitol Hill this week to review what research has shown.
Depending on the time frame, the data can be encouraging or discouraging. The nonprofit Gun Violent Archive has published the raw numbers for the last decade. The number of deaths and injuries from gun violence were both markedly higher last year than in 2015. There were more than 16,700 deaths in 2024 compared with nearly 14,000 a decade earlier.
On the other hand, last year's numbers in both categories were down from the toll in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, which were notable for increases in many crime categories. Gun violence levels clearly have receded as the pandemic and its many disruptions faded.
Anticrime advocates have touted local community violence interventions, often abbreviated as CVI's, as keys to controlling the gun violence problem in addition to law enforcement.
In a description of ongoing research, criminologist Edward Maguire of Arizona State University said the "demand for non-police anti-violence strategies has increased dramatically. Unprecedented amounts of funding are being made available for such strategies at the federal, state, and local level. Have they worked?"
Maguire addressed that issue at the briefing. Many of the initiatives are too new to have been evaluated thoroughly, but Maguire and his associates tracked down 21 completed studies and concluded that overall, the programs have helped produce a "small but significant reduction in gun violence."
Maguire noted that some of the interventions have been particularly effective in preventing non-fatal shootings, which get much less attention than homicides. The Gun Violence Archive put the number of gun violence injuries last year at 31,646, much below the 2021 toll of more than 40,000.
In another presentation, James Burch of the National Policing Institute described the operations of 57 gun crime intelligence centers funded by the Justice Department to coordinate federal, state and local work in "identifying perpetrators, linking criminal activities, and identifying sources of crime guns for immediate disruption, investigation, and prosecution."
Burch said the effort has succeeded in targeting many of the highest-profile violators of gun laws. He stressed that continued funding of these programs is "critical," an issue that may face many anticrime programs amid the current effort by the newly installed Trump administration to reduce federal spending sharply across the board.
One leading gun violence researcher who spoke on Capitol Hill, Garen Wintemute of the University of California Davis, said he already had discovered that several federal research funding opportunities he had planned to pursue had been cancelled.
Other speakers included Alex Piquero of the University of Miami, Anthony Braga of the University of Pennsylvania, Joseph Richardson of the University of Maryland, Veronica Pear of the University of California Davis, April Zeoli of the University of Michigan and Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University.
The George Mason University center plans to post videos of all presentations on its website soon.