39,773: How many Americans lost their lives to firearms in 2017.
1.625 million: the number of Americans who have died from gunfire since 1968 — more than the accumulated American deaths from all wars since the country’s founding more than 200 years ago.
These are numbers that everyone agrees on. From here, nearly everything else that can be said about gun violence in the U.S. elicits a partisan response.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A growing chorus of researchers wants to study gun violence in the U.S. as a public health issue, similar to the way they have tracked automobile or workplace safety for decades. Though limited by largely political obstacles around funding, experts including epidemiologists, social scientists and statisticians say that unbiased, peer-reviewed research is a missing piece of the gun violence discussion. Given the magnitude of the problem — not just in lives lost but in the consequences for survivors, families and entire communities — a purely scientific approach may hold the key to making progress toward reducing injuries and fatalities.
