Gun Violence as a Policy Problem
Gun Violence as a Policy Problem
Policy makers need evidence-grounded options to defeat partisan gridlock
In the aftermath of the latest mass killing in the United States, I have been thinking about this Tweet from Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO).
Gun violence is indeed a policy problem. I am not an expert in gun violence but I am an expert in policy problems, especially those in the context of deep partisan divides. I should be able to offer more than just outrage and frustration, which I have plenty of as well. In this post I offer some recommendations on what President Biden and the United States Congress need to do now to start addressing gun violence as a policy problem. In response to Rep. Crow, here are some practical steps that you and your colleagues can take right away.
To effectively make progress on any policy problem, we need to understand the nature of that problem. For instance, the politics and policies of how we address risks of tornadoes are going to have little in common with how we govern abortion. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the politics of gun violence in the United States have a lot more in common with abortion politics than tornado politics. Even though guns policy in America has long been characterized by partisan gridlock, that does not preclude policy progress.
Guns in the US are deeply polarizing and that situation has gotten worse over many decades. This seemingly obvious statement is backed by research. Mark Joslyn of the University of Kansas observes that from 1976 to 2016 among gun owners the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats in presidential elections increased from 9% (46% of gun owners voting Republican to 37% voting Democratic) to 31% (61% R to 30% D). Other recent research suggests that Republican opposition to policies focused on gun violence is associated with declining overall trust in government. And another recent paper found that “gun rights rhetoric may function as a racial dog whistle.” Deeply partisan politics, lack trust in government, racial resentment . . . it would be difficult to conjure up a more toxic context for making policy progress.
So what to do?
I have two suggestions.
First, if there ever was an issue well-suited for the implementation of the honest brokering of policy alternatives, it is this one. Honest brokering is a process designed to provide policy makers with a smorgasbord of options for action. The point is to survey and suggest what could be done (and with what expected outcomes) rather than what should be done. Honest brokering on complex topics requires not just a wide range of expertise, but also engagement of stakeholders from communities potentially affected by the relevant policies. The goal of honest brokering is not consensus on a single path forward, but the development and presentation of a range of paths into the future to empower decision makers on both policy and politics.
President Biden should immediately call for the U.S. Congress to empanel a gun violence commission, perhaps modeled on the well-regarded, bipartisan 9/11 Commission that worked from 2002-2004. Such a commission should be bipartisan and charged with surveying, developing, presenting and justifying options for action to address gun violence in the United States. Honest brokering holds the hope (if not always the reality) of developing new policy possibilities that allow political compromise.
The commission should be given a fairly short-term mandate (for comparison the 9/11 Commission’s work took place in under 2 years) to produce a set of implementable policies to address gun violence in the United States. For those opposed to any action, “do nothing” and its consequences can certainly be listed among the smorgasbord of options. Honest brokering creates legitimacy and trust because it seeks to include a wide range of perspectives, thus empowering policy makers to select those options they believe to be most effective, both in terms of policy and politics. At present it is difficult for anyone, including policy makers, to understand with clarity what might be done and with what possible results. In such a situation, we should not be surprised that people rely instead on political cues to decide what responses to support. Honest brokering empowers all of us to do better.
There are obstacles to honest brokering to be sure. For some politicians, honest brokering in the form of action alternatives lays bare democratic accountability, and this is viewed as a flaw not a feature. If a policy maker is provided a set of options for action that they then choose to ignore, we can call observe that behavior. Best not to have options if you’d like to avoid democracy. Others who oppose honest brokering include those happy with the status quo. Why come up with policy alternatives if your favored policy is the status quo? And finally, a third objection to honest brokering is that those who believe that they already have the best solution often do not wish to give exposure to any other possible option, lest policy makers choose the “wrong” path forward. However, a strength of honest brokering is that its focus on options can help to identify points of compromise and incremental action necessary for any progress in highly politicized contexts. Another word for this is democracy.
My second recommendation is that Congress needs to support and improve the evidence base for developing policy options for addressing gun violence. A literature review on The Science of Gun Policy published in 2020 by the RAND Corporation found that among the studies it reviewed,
Of more than 200 combinations of policies and outcomes, we found that surprisingly few were the subject of methodologically rigorous investigation . . . The lack of research on a wide range of outcomes makes it difficult or impossible to conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the gun policies.
How can we expect to debate and implement effective policies to address gun violence in this context? Again, in the absence of evidence, political identity may fill the gap. RAND found that our lack of knowledge of the effectiveness of policies related to gun violence has been intentional, a willful ignorance:
The modest growth in knowledge about the effects of gun policy since 1995 reflects, in part, the past reluctance of the U.S. government to sponsor work in this area at levels comparable to its investment in other areas of public safety and health, such as transportation safety or opioid overdoses. The federal government’s support for research on gun violence prevention has been negligible for more than 20 years; however, in late 2019, Congress appropriated $25 million for this purpose (Pub. L. 116-94), which represents an important new federal initiative that, if sustained in future budgets, could make enormous contributions to knowledge about how to prevent gun-related injuries and deaths.
One important function than an honest brokering commission can serve it to identify what we know, what we don’t, what we need to know and make recommendations for different ways to obtain that knowledge. The inattention to developing an evidence base in support of policy development focused on addressing gun violence has been a major failure of the U.S. government for many decades. That failure can be addressed immediately.
Few would deny that gun violence is a problem in the United States. Developing a consensus about how to respond will require innovative approaches to policy development and implementation. Right now politicians are hearing from many people telling them what they should do. Perhaps in addition, we need to empower politicians by also helping them to understand what they could do. A 9/11-style commission on gun violence is one way to open up the policy and politics of gun violence in the United States.
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I've been giving this a think, and I'm not sure I understand the problem...
By that, I mean what are we trying to solve?
Certainly we can all agree that we don't want the mass murder of children.
But where is the upper bound of the problem? To prevent gun crime, to prevent murders, to prevent gun deaths, to prevent mass murders or to focus on the murder of children?
And what would be an acceptable outcome for a solution? We have around 40,000 deaths on the roads each year, compared with around 14,000 firearm homisides. And we are not afraid to drive.
Around 1,200 kids under 15 die on our roads, and though those lost lives are a tradgedy, and we do continue to improve road safety, it is a level of risk we accept. We lose around 250 kids each year murdered by guns, and a similar number lost to gun related suicides and accidents.
What would be the "acceptable risk" to offset the benefits of gun ownership, in the same way we "accept" the 1,200 kids lost for the benefit of car ownership.
It seems to me, as an outside observer, that the gun control debate in the USA is caught between two intentionally misleading definitions. The pro-gun-control side (PGC) roll all multiple victim incidences into the one mass shooting statistic to make a more horror-filled headline “240 Mass Shootings already this year” even though a school shooting is very different to a shoot-out between police and gangsters and surely needs different policy. The anti-gun-control side (AGC) roll all attempts at gun control into the one category although a law to control military machine guns is clearly different to a law to control a 0.22 rifle for shooting rabbits. Somehow an Honest Broker needs to ensure that the debate is more nuanced and to stop this use of debate-by-definition because this sets up an unsolvable demonisation of the opposition.