WHAT WE Don't KNOW CAN KILL US: Confronting Gun Violence with DATA

For decades, progress in gun violence reduction has been stymied by limited access to data that are essential for measuring and characterizing gun crime, developing evidence-based interventions to reduce it, and evaluating their effectiveness. But today across the country, researchers, cities, and private companies are finding ways to break through the gridlock by creating new tools for understanding and reducing gun violence:

Domestic violence: The Philadelphia Police Department and professor Susan Sorenson have developed a new system for reporting domestic violence cases, particularly with regard to firearm-involvement, city has experienced a significant decline in domestic violence homicide as a result.

Social networks and firearm possession: The Chicago Crime Lab is at the vanguard of analyzing city crime gun trace data, which connects guns recovered at crime scenes to the licensed dealers where they were first sold. Their work was at the heart of a recent analysis of gun trafficking put out by the Mayor's office in Chicago. Yale criminology professor Andy Papachristos,  has conducted research on social networks of criminals showing the small share of the population perpetrating the majority of crime.

Exposure to gunfire: The tech startup Shotspotter SST has developed novel methods for measuring and geo-locating gun violence with acoustic sensors, which they currently have deployed across more than 50 U.S. cities.

The impact of illegal gun sales: Everytown for Gun Safety views improving the evidence-base about measures to prevent gun violence as a key step to advancing them, and has conducted a number of novel investigations over the years to better understand the behavior of gun buyers and sellers and the flows of guns from the legal to the illegal market.