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Through their grief, the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have become a political force. One week after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz allegedly used an AR-15 to shoot and kill 17 people at the school, around 100 students met with lawmakers in the Florida state capital to advocate for gun control. They also met with President Trump in the White House Wednesday. In organizing the March For Our Lives, they'll rally next month in Washington, D.C.

But with the right of gun ownership enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, gun regulations remain a thorny issue in the U.S. Throughout history, there have been several laws and Supreme Court cases that have shaped the Second Amendment. This timeline outlines the most important events in influencing the country's federal gun policy.

1791

On Dec. 15, 1791, ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution - eventually known as the Bill of Rights - were ratified. The second of them said: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

1934

The first piece of national gun control legislation was passed on June 26, 1934. The National Firearms Act (NFA) - part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's " New Deal for Crime"- was meant to curtail "gangland crimes of that era such as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. "

The NFA imposed a tax on the manufacturing, selling, and transporting of firearms listed in the law, among them short-barrel shotguns and rifles, machine guns, firearm mufflers and silencers. Due to constitutional flaws, the NFA was modified several times. The $200 tax, which was high for the era, was put in place to curtail the transfer of these weapons.

1938

The Federal Firearms Act (FFA) of 1938 required gun manufacturers, importers, and dealers to obtain a federal firearms license. It also defined a group of people, including convicted felons, who could not purchase guns, and mandated that gun sellers keep customer records. The FFA was repealed in 1968 by the Gun Control Act (GCA), though many of its provisions were reenacted by the GCA.

1939

In 1939 the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case United States v. Miller, ruling that through the National Firearms Act of 1934, Congress could regulate the interstate selling of a short barrel shotgun. The court stated that there was no evidence that a sawed off shotgun "has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia," and thus "we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument."

1968

Following the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed for the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The GCA repealed and replaced the FFA, updated Title II of the NFA to fix constitutional issues, added language about "destructive devices" (such as bombs, mines and grenades) and expanded the definition of "machine gun."

Overall the bill banned importing guns that have "no sporting purpose," imposed age restrictions for the purchase of handguns (gun owners had to be 21), prohibited felons, the mentally ill, and others from purchasing guns, required that all manufactured or imported guns have a serial number, and according to the ATF, imposed "stricter licensing and regulation on the firearms industry."

1986

In 1986 the Firearm Owners Protection Act was passed by Congress. The law mainly enacted protections for gun owners - prohibiting a national registry of dealer records, limiting ATF inspections to once per year (unless there are multiple infractions), softening what is defined as "engaging in the business" of selling firearms, and allowing licensed dealers to sell firearms at "gun shows" in their state. It also loosened regulations on the sale and transfer of ammunition.

The bill also codified some gun control measures, including expanding the GCA to prohibit civilian ownership or transfer of machine guns made after May 19, 1986, and redefining "silencer" to include parts intended to make silencers.

1993

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 is named after White House press secretary James Brady, who was permanently disabled from an injury suffered during an attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. (Brady died in 2014). It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The law, which amends the GCA, requires that background checks be completed before a gun is purchased from a licensed dealer, manufacturer or importer. It established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is maintained by the FBI.

1994

Tucked into the sweeping and controversial Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by President Clinton in 1994, is the subsection titled Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act. This is known as the assault weapons ban - a temporary prohibition in effect from September of 1994 to September of 2004. Multiple attempts to renew the ban have failed.

The provisions of the bill outlawed the ability to "manufacture, transfer, or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon," unless it was "lawfully possessed under Federal law on the date of the enactment of this subsection." Nineteen military-style or "copy-cat" assault weapons-including AR-15s, TEC-9s, MAC-10s, etc.-could not be manufactured or sold. It also banned "certain high-capacity ammunition magazines of more than ten rounds," according to a U.S. Department of Justice Fact Sheet.

2003

The Tiahrt Amendment, proposed by Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), prohibited the ATF from publicly releasing data showing where criminals purchased their firearms and stipulated that only law enforcement officers or prosecutors could access such information.

"The law effectively shields retailers from lawsuits, academic study and public scrutiny," The Washington Post wrote in 2010. "It also keeps the spotlight off the relationship between rogue gun dealers and the black market in firearms."

There have been efforts to repeal this amendment.

2005

In 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was signed by President George W. Bush to prevent gun manufacturers from being named in federal or state civil suits by those who were victims of crimes involving guns made by that company.

The first provision of this law is "to prohibit causes of action against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, and importers of firearms or ammunition products, and their trade associations, for the harm solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse of firearm products or ammunition products by others when the product functioned as designed and intended." It also dismissed pending cases on October 26, 2005.

2008

District of Columbia v. Heller essentially changed a nearly 70-year precedent set by Miller in 1939. While the Miller ruling focused on the "well regulated militia" portion of the Second Amendment (known as the "collective rights theory" and referring to a state's right to defend itself), Heller focused on the "individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia."

Heller challenged the constitutionality of a 32-year-old handgun ban in Washington, D.C., and found, "The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment."

It did not however nullify other gun control provisions. "The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms," stated the ruling.

Correction: The original version of this story misstated what happened to White House Press Secretary James Brady during an attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. He was injured and permanently disabled, but he did not die in the attack. He died in 2014.

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Here's a Timeline of the Major Gun Control Laws in America

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This timeline outlines the most important events influencing the U.S.A.'s federal gun policy, from 1791 to the present.

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US gun laws: Why it won’t follow New Zealand’s lead

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A mass shooting in New Zealand has led to an assault-weapon ban six days later, drawing contrasts with the US.

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You can read the interview OR listen by clicking on the blue triangle in the upper left.

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New Zealand's prime minister announced a ban military-style semi-automatic weapons. NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with UCLA law professor Adam Winkler about why changing U.S. gun policy is more difficult.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Ban them. There is no place for them. We have heard very similar sentiments from people here in the U.S. after mass shootings, but it's not nearly as easy to change gun laws in this country. To talk about why that is, we reached out to Adam Winkler. He's a law professor at UCLA. Welcome.

ADAM WINKLER: Thanks so much for having me.

CHANG: As we just heard a few minutes ago, the prime minister of New Zealand announces this ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons less than one week after the mass shooting that left 50 people dead. And when Ardern made the announcement, she emphasized that in New Zealand, gun ownership is a privilege, not a right, which is obviously not the case here. So let's just start with that very important difference between the two countries.

WINKLER: Well, I don't think that is the difference that explains why America is not moving on gun control. The difference is really the political power of the gun rights movement in America. The Second Amendment certainly plays an important role in shaping cultural attitudes about guns and forming American politics about guns. But the courts haven't used the Second Amendment to strike down lots of laws. And most courts have upheld the kinds of laws that New Zealand is considering, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and bans on military-style rifles. The problem is the NRA won't let those laws be passed in America.

CHANG: I'm curious. Can you talk about a couple of recent examples where it seemed like there was substantial momentum in this country to change gun laws but then nothing ended up happening?

WINKLER: Well, right after the Newtown shooting, President Obama put the weight of the presidency behind gun control efforts to get universal background checks.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BARACK OBAMA: There's no reason why we can't get that done. That is not a liberal idea or a conservative idea. It's not a Democratic or Republican idea. That is a smart idea. We want to keep those guns out of hands of folks who shouldn't have them.

WINKLER: And that failed in the Senate.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

OBAMA: I'm going to speak plainly and honestly about what's happened here because the American people are trying to figure out, how can something have 90 percent support and yet not happen?

WINKLER: And that really put a damper on future federal gun control efforts. We've also seen, after Las Vegas, that there was a move to pass a federal law banning bump stocks.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DIANNE FEINSTEIN: We have now witnessed the deadliest mass shooting in United States history - nearly 60 killed and more than 500 injured. Those numbers are simply stunning.

WINKLER: But members of Congress didn't want to be on record voting in favor of gun control, and so Congress kicked it to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

CHANG: Let's talk about the NRA - the National Rifle Association - which obviously has tremendous influence here in the U.S. New Zealand has groups like the NRA, but they don't have nearly the same kind of power. Can you explain - how does the NRA exert its tremendous influence here?

WINKLER: Well, everyone thinks the NRA is so powerful because it's so rich and it does so much lobbying. And those are important aspects of the NRA's power, but we shouldn't underestimate how the NRA brings voters out on Election Day. And in a democracy, if you can sway voters - and there are a lot of single-issue, pro-gun voters that follow the NRA - you're going to be a powerful political force in elections.

CHANG: Now, both the U.S. and New Zealand have robust gun cultures, but why do you think gun owners here seem more resistant to changes in gun control laws?

WINKLER: Well, it could be the role of the Second Amendment in shaping cultural attitudes and opinions about gun rights. For the last 40 years or so, the NRA has been very active in promoting a vision of the Second Amendment that suggests that any law that restricts guns is a violation of that right, almost the kind of way that we sometimes - First Amendment rights - that any restriction on speech is a fundamental affront to the First Amendment. That kind of absolutist approach, though, doesn't create a lot of space for reform or compromise.

CHANG: Do you feel like the American gun culture is unique?

WINKLER: The American gun culture is pretty unique. I mean, it comes out of the unique circumstances of America and our federalist system, which has also, historically, prevented a lot of gun legislation from being adopted. But the NRA is busy exporting its idea of gun rights and has been active in New Zealand. But it hasn't really taken hold, as evidenced by the fact that even the main opposition groups in New Zealand have already signaled that they're going to support this new gun reform.

CHANG: Adam Winkler is a law professor at UCLA. Thanks very much for joining us today.

WINKLER: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Why It's More Difficult To Change Gun Policy In The U.S. Than In New Zealand

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New Zealand's prime minister announced a ban military-style semi-automatic weapons. NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with UCLA law professor Adam Winkler about why changing U.S. gun policy is more difficult. AILSA CHANG, HOST: Ban them. There is no place for them. We have heard very similar sentiments from people here in the U.S.

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History of Gun Control Laws
Gun control laws are just as old or older than the Second Amendment (ratified in 1791). Some examples of gun control throughout colonial America included criminalizing the transfer of guns to Catholics, enslaved people, indentured servants, and Native Americans; regulating the storage of gun powder in homes; banning loaded guns in Boston houses; and mandating participation in formal gathering of troops and door-to-door surveys about guns owned.

Guns were common in the American Colonies, first for hunting and general self-protection and later as weapons in the American Revolutionary War. Several colonies' gun laws required that heads of households (including women) own guns and that all able-bodied men enroll in the militia and carry personal firearms. Read more history...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

The Second Amendment is not an unlimited or individual right to own guns.

Further, the Second Amendment was intended to protect the right of militias to own guns, not the right of individuals to own guns. Former Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissenting opinion for District of Columbia et al. v. Heller, wrote, "the Framer's single-minded focus in crafting the constitutional guarantee 'to keep and bear arms' was on military use of firearms, which they viewed in the context of service in state militias," hence the inclusion of the phrase "well regulated militia."

Michael Waldman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, stated there is nothing about an individual right to bear arms in the notes about the Second Amendment when it was being drafted, discussed, or ratified; the US Supreme Court declined to rule in favor of the individual right four times between 1876 and 1939; and all law articles on the Second Amendment from 1888 to 1959 stated that an individual right was not guaranteed.
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Pro 2

More gun control laws would reduce gun deaths.

Approximately 50% of unintentional fatal shootings were self-inflicted; and most unintentional firearm deaths were caused by friends or family members.

Five women are murdered with guns every day in the United States. A woman's risk of being murdered increases 500% if a gun is present during a domestic dispute. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 5,364 US soldiers were killed in action between Oct. 7, 2001 and Jan. 28, 2015; between 2001 and 2012 6,410 women were killed with a gun by an intimate partner in the United States.

Researchers found that a "general barrier to firearm access created through state regulation can have a significant deterrent effect on male suicide rates in the United States. Permit requirements and bans on sales to minors were the most effective of the regulations analyzed."

Gun licensing laws were associated with a 14% decrease in firearm homicides, while increases in firearm homicides were seen in places with right-to-carry and stand-your ground-laws.

More gun control leads to fewer suicides. When US gun ownership goes down, overall suicide rates drop; meanwhile, each 10 percentage-point increase in gun ownership is linked to a 26.9% increase in the youth suicide rate. In Indiana and Connecticut, after "red flag" laws to remove guns from people who may pose a threat were enacted, gun suicides decreased by 7.5% and 13.7% respectively, while suicides by other means did not decrease during the same time. A person who wants to kill him/herself is unlikely to commit suicide with poison or a knife when a gun is unavailable.

The US General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 31% of total accidental shooting deaths could have been prevented by installing safety devices on guns: 100% of deaths per year in which a child under 6 years old shoots and kills him/herself or another child could be prevented by automatic child-proof safety locks; and 23% of accidental shooting deaths by adolescents and adults per year could be prevented by loading indicators showing when a bullet was in the chamber ready to be fired.

Marjorie Sanfilippo, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Eckerd College who has researched children's behavior around guns, stated, "We put gates around swimming pools to keep children from drowning. We put safety caps on medications to keep children from poisoning themselves.... [B]ecause children are naturally curious and impulsive, and because we have shown time and again that we cannot 'gun-proof' them with education, we have a responsibility to keep guns out of the hands of children."
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Pro 3

The presence of a gun makes a conflict more likely to become violent.

The FBI found that arguments (such as romantic triangles, brawls fueled by alcohol or drugs, and arguments over money) resulted in 1,962 gun deaths (59.9% of the total).

An editorial published in the American Journal of Public Health noted, "gun-inflicted deaths [often] ensue from impromptu arguments and fights; in the US, two-thirds of the 7,900 deaths in 1981 involving arguments and brawls were caused by guns." A study published in the same journal found that "the weapons used [in altercations]... were those closest at hand." And thus, according to another study, "[r]ather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance."

Common sense gun control laws can decrease the likelihood of a violent situation turning deadly. President Ronald Reagan and others did not think the AR-15 military rifle (also called M16s by the Air Force) should be owned by civilians and, when the AR-15 was included in the assault weapons ban of 1994 (which expired on Sep. 13, 2004), the NRA supported the legislation. A Mother Jones investigation found that high-capacity magazines were used in at least 50% of the 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012.When high-capacity magazines were used in mass shootings, the death rate rose 63% and the injury rate rose 156%.
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Pro 4

A majority of adults, including gun owners, support common sense gun control such as background checks, bans on assault weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines.

According to a Feb. 20, 2018 Quinnipiac Poll, 97% of American voters and 97% of gun owners support universal background checks. 67% support a nationwide ban on assault weapons, and 83% support mandatory waiting periods for gun purchases.

As much as 40% of all gun sales are undocumented private party gun sales that do not require a background check (aka the "gun show loophole").

53% of all adults surveyed approve of high-capacity magazine bans. 89% of adults with a gun in the home approve of laws to prevent the purchase of guns by the mentally ill, and 82% approve of banning gun sales to people on no-fly lists.

77% of Americans support requiring a license to purchase a gun.

Don Macalady, member of Hunters against Gun Violence, stated, "As a hunter and someone who has owned guns since I was a young boy, I believe that commonsense gun legislation makes us all safer. Background checks prevent criminals and other dangerous people from getting guns."

Many would like to see the U.S. enact more laws like other countries, citing the fact that countries with restrictive gun control laws have lower gun homicide and suicide rates than the United States. Both Switzerland and Finland require gun owners to acquire licenses and pass background checks that include mental and criminal records, among other restrictions and requirements. In 2007 Switzerland ranked number 3 in international gun ownership rates with 45.7 guns per 100 people (about 3,400,000 guns total). In 2009 Switzerland had 24 gun homicides (0.31 deaths per 100,000 people) and 253 gun suicides (3.29 deaths per 100,000 people). Finland ranked fourth in international gun ownership rates with 45.3 guns per 100 people (about 2,400,000 guns total). In 2007 Finland had 23 (0.43 deaths per 100,000 people) gun homicides and 172 gun suicides (4.19 deaths per 100,000 people).
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Con 1

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution protects individual gun ownership.

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution reads, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Lawrence Hunter, Chairman of Revolution PAC, stated, "The Founders understood that the right to own and bear laws is as fundamental and as essential to maintaining liberty as are the rights of free speech, a free press, freedom of religion and the other protections against government encroachments on liberty delineated in the Bill of Rights."
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Con 2

Gun control laws are discriminatory and infringe on citizens' rights

Current gun control laws are frequently aimed at inner city, poor, black communities who are perceived as more dangerous than white gun owners. Charles Gallagher, Chair of Sociology at LaSalle University, stated that some gun control laws are still founded on racial fears: "Whites walking down Main Street with an AK-47 are defenders of American values; a black man doing the same thing is Public Enemy No. 1."

Background checks and micro-stamping are an invasion of privacy. Background checks require government databases that keep personal individual information on gun owners, including name, addresses, mental health history, criminal records, and more. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) worried that Senator Harry Reid's 2013 proposed background check legislation (the bill failed 54-46) would have allowed the government to keep databases of gun purchases indefinitely, creating a "worry that you're going to see searches of the databases and an expansion for purposes that were not intended when the information was collected." Micro-stamping similarly requires a database of gun owners and the codes their personal guns would stamp on cartridge cases. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) wrote that they would oppose any legislation that infringes "on the American people's constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance."

Gun control laws infringe upon the right to self-defense and deny people a sense of safety. The police cannot protect everyone all of the time. 61% of men and 56% of women surveyed by Pew Research said that stricter gun laws would "make it more difficult for people to protect their homes and families." Nelson Lund, Professor at George Mason University School of Law, stated, "The right to self-defense and to the means of defending oneself is a basic natural right that grows out of the right to life" and "many [gun control laws] interfere with the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves against violent criminals." A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made them feel safer and 64% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein, a gun control advocate, carried a concealed gun when her life was threatened and her home attacked by the New World Liberation Front in the 1970s.

Gun control laws, especially those that try to ban "assault weapons," infringe upon the right to own guns for hunting and sport. In 2011, there were 13.7 million hunters 16 years old or older in the United States, High-powered semiautomatic rifles and shotguns are used to hunt and in target shooting tournaments each year. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, "So-called 'Assault weapons' are more often than not less powerful than other hunting rifles. The term 'assault weapon' was conjured up by anti-gun legislators to scare voters into thinking these firearms are something out of a horror movie... [T]he Colt AR-15 and Springfield M1A, both labeled 'assault weapons,' are the rifles most used for marksmanship competitions in the United States. And their cartridges are standard hunting calibers, useful for game up to and including deer." According to a Feb. 2013 Pew Research report, 32% of gun owners owned guns for hunting and 7% owned guns for target or sport shooting.
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Con 3

Gun control laws simply do not work.

Gun control efforts have proved ineffective. According to David Lampo, Publications Director of the Cato Institute, "there is no correlation between waiting periods and murder or robbery rates." Banning high-capacity magazines will not necessarily deter crime because even small gun magazines can be changed in seconds.The "gun show loophole" is virtually nonexistent because commercial dealers, who sell the majority of guns at shows and elsewhere, are bound by strict federal laws. According to a Mar. 10, 2016 Lancet study, most state-level gun control laws do not reduce firearm death rates, and, of 25 state laws, nine were associated with higher gun death rates.

Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and yet, in 2012, Mexico had 11,309 gun murders (9.97 gun homicides per 100,000 people) compared to the United States that had 9,146 gun homicides (2.97 per 100,000 people). The country has only one legal gun store (the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales), compared to at least 63,709 legal gun stores and pawn shops in the United States as of Feb. 10, 2014. Mexico's gun store is on a secure military base and customers must present a valid ID, go through a metal detector, and turn over cellphones and cameras to guards. To actually buy a gun, customers have to show proof of honest income, provide references, pass a criminal background check, prove any military duties were completed with honor, and be fingerprinted and photographed. If allowed to purchase a gun, the customer may buy only one gun (choosing from only .38 caliber pistols or lower) and one box of bullets. Between 2006 and 2010, Mexico's one gun shop sold 6,490 guns, yet as of 2012, Mexicans own about 15,000,000 guns, or about 13.5 guns per 100 people.

The main reason gun control doesn't work is because laws will not prevent criminals from obtaining guns or breaking laws. Of 62 mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and 2012, 49 of the shooters used legally obtained guns. Collectively, 143 guns were possessed by the killers with about 75% obtained legally. A Secret Service analysis found that of 24 mass shootings in 2019 at least 10 (42%) involved illegally possessed guns.

The logical conclusion is that gun control laws do not deter crime; gun ownership deters crime. A study in Applied Economics Letters found that "assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level" and "states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murders." While gun ownership doubled in the twentieth century, the murder rate decreased. Journalist John Stossel explained, "Criminals don't obey the law... Without the fear of retaliation from victims who might be packing heat, criminals in possession of these [illegal] weapons now have a much easier job... As the saying goes, 'If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.'"

More gun control is not needed; education about guns and gun safety is needed to prevent accidental gun deaths. 95% of all US gun owners believe that children should learn about gun safety. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, Inc (SAAMI), stated, "Whether in the field, at the range or in the home, a responsible and knowledgeable gun owner is rarely involved in a firearms accident of any kind." According to Kyle Wintersteen, Managing Editor of Guns and Ammo, studies show that "children taught about firearms and their legitimate uses by family members have much lower rates of delinquency than children in households without guns" and "children introduced to guns associate them with freedom, security, and recreation-not violence." [82] [85] [154]
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Con 4

Gun control laws give too much power to the government and may result in government tyranny and the government taking away all guns from citizens.

57% of people surveyed by Pew Research in Feb. 2013 said that gun control laws would "give too much power to the government over the people."

The NRA's Wayne LaPierre stated, "if you look at why our Founding Fathers put it [the Second Amendment] there, they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this new country would never be subjugated again and have to live under tyranny."

Concurring, Alex Jones, radio host, stated, "The Second Amendment isn't there for duck hunting, it's there to protect us from tyrannical government and street thugs... 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!"

Marco Rubio (R-FL), US Senator, speaking about gun control laws during his 2016 presidential campaign, stated, "If God forbid, ISIS visits our life, our neighborhood, our school, any part of us, the last thing standing, the last line of defense could very well be our ability to protect ourselves."
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Did You Know?

1. A Pew Foundation report found that 79% of male gun owners and 80% of female gun owners said owning a gun made them feel safer, and 64% of people living in a home in which someone else owns a gun felt safer.

2. The US General Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that 100% of deaths per year in which a child under 6 years old shoots and kills him/herself or another child could be prevented by automatic child-proof safety locks.

3. The Centers for Disease Control listed firearms as the #12 cause of all deaths between 1999 and 2015, representing 1.3% of total deaths. They were also the #1 method of death by homicide (67.3% of all homicides) and by suicide (51.9% of all suicides).

4. Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and yet, in 2012, Mexico had 11,309 gun murders (9.97 gun homicides per 100,000 people) compared to the United States that had 9,146 gun homicides (2.97 per 100,000 people).

5. Carrying a concealed handgun in public has been permitted in all 50 states since 2013, when Illinois became the last state to enact concealed carry legislation.

6. Five women a day are killed by guns in America. A woman's risk of being murdered increases 500% if a gun is present during a domestic dispute.

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Proponents say the Second Amendment is not an unlimited right to own guns. Opponents say the amendment protects individual gun ownership.

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cory booker opens up about gun violence in his community - cnn video

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Cory Booker opens up about gun violence in his community - CNN Video

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Democratic 2020 candidate Cory Booker and CNN's Jake Tapper discuss how gun violence has affected his community in Newark, New Jersey.

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how 2020 democratic presidential candidates plan to tackle gun violence  - cnn video

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How 2020 Democratic presidential candidates plan to tackle gun violence - CNN Video

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Gun violence is poised to be a prominent issue in the Democratic presidential primary, with the party's voters overwhelmingly in favor of expanding background checks and banning high-capacity magazines and assault weapons.

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marjory stoneman douglas high school (parkland

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On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets in Washington and cities across the globe to take a stance against gun violence.

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Mass shootings, and calls for gun control. They're familiar refrains in the news, prompting debates on the right to bear arms and government efforts to limit access to guns in the name of public safety.

Here's a look at guns and gun violence in charts and graphics:

The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country

Civilians in the United States own about 270 million guns, according to a 2007 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. That's slightly more than the population of Indonesia, the world's fourth most-populated country. America ranks No. 1 in firearms per capita.

And demand for guns is on the rise

According to the FBI, 2015 was a record year for background checks on guns. Some have pointed out the requests for background checks have gone up after mass shootings, the idea being that shootings cause people to worry about their safety and buy a gun to protect themselves. The month after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, for example, saw a surge in requests for background checks. The terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, had a similar effect.

Even though the homicide rate has fallen sharply in the last 50 years

The intense public focus on mass shootings and other killings belies a larger trend: The homicide rate has fallen sharply in the United States. The homicide rates for 2013 and 2014 were the lowest in more than 50 years. Firearms are used in roughly 7 in 10 killings, the FBI says.

Handguns are the weapons used most often in homicides

After many shootings, the focus immediately shifts toward restricting the use of AR-15s or other semiautomatic rifles. But statistics show that most murders in the United States are not a part of mass shootings, and handguns are the most common weapon.

Gun violence kills far more Americans than terrorism

During his presidency, Barack Obama has had to deliver statements on gun violence regularly. After a shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College in October, he asked news organizations to tally up the number of Americans killed by terrorist attacks in the last decade and compare it with the number of Americans who have died in gun violence.

Most U.S. gun deaths are suicides

Of the more than 400,000 people who died as a result of gun violence from 2001 to 2013, about three in five were from suicide. Just under two in five - or about 156,000 people - died of homicide.

Seven in 10 active shootings are in schools, businesses

Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut; a conference center in San Bernardino, California, where a holiday party was taking place; Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina - these are some of the more public places that have seen major mass shootings.

Shooter incidents: Most take own life

The FBI studied 160 specific types of active-shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013. The study doesn't encompass all shootings, but gives insight into how some situations could end. Unlike a homicide or mass killing, the "active" aspect implies that both law enforcement and citizens have the potential to affect the outcome of the event based upon their responses.

This story first published on December 4, 2015. It has been updated to add additional graphics.

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international relations and national security

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U.S. gun violence: The story in charts and graphs | CNN

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Mass shootings, and calls for gun control. They're familiar refrains in the news, prompting debates on the right to bear arms and government efforts to limit access to guns in the name of public safety.

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Newsela | Safety In Schools: The Debate Over Guns & The Second Amendment

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Safe storage, red flag laws, group therapy, and focusing on likely offenders can help prevent shootings.

To color in the empty spaces these young deaths leave, The Trace and worked with more than 200 student journalists across the country to profile young people lost to guns during the 12 months that started with the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last February 14th. In all, the teen reporters identified nearly 1,200 victims, a count that excluded youth who died by gun suicide. They profiled children killed in mass shootings you undoubtedly heard about, but also those whose deaths barely made local news. Together, the stories form Miami Herald Since Parkland, an unprecedented illustration of the toll of gun violence on our country's kids.

The high rate of child gun deaths is a uniquely American problem . But there are evidence-based solutions that can save lives. We've interviewed the experts and engaged with the research. Below, you'll find the most promising laws and programs to reduce youth gun violence.

What Works

Locking Up Guns

One of the most effective ways of keeping kids safe from guns is one of the simplest: requiring people to safely store their weapons. Massachusetts has the most stringent statute, a true "safe storage" law that actually mandates that gun owners lock away firearms, unloaded, when not in use. Three more states impose a similar requirement when the gun owner lives with kids or has another reason to believe that children might be able to access his or her firearms.

Harvard public health scholar Deb Azrael believes storage laws may nudge gun owners to make safer choices. "If you live in a place where the state is explicit and serious about securing firearms, that might lead you to lock up yours," Azrael said.

Holding adults responsible when kids use their guns

Instead of mandating how weapons should be stored, child access prevention (CAP) laws allow prosecutors to bring charges against gun owners if they allow firearms to end up in a child's hands.

When the RAND Corporation conducted a massive review of gun policy, researchers found more evidence to support the effectiveness of child access and safe storage laws than any other type of regulation. Academics have found the laws were particularly useful for reducing suicide and unintentional shootings. One study from 2004 found evidence that state child access laws lowered the gun suicide rate among teenagers by 10 percent. Not all child access laws are created equal, however. "There's a spectrum," said Andrew Morral, who led the review of gun policy for RAND. Four states hold adults responsible when guns are accessible to children under any circumstances, while seven more penalize adults only if the child actually carries or uses the gun. The think tank didn't determine which variety of child access laws are most effective. Prosecutors also pursue child access cases unevenly, with one review showing that less than half of child-related gun accidents resulted in prosecution.

Offering therapy and mentorship to young people

When researchers at the University of Chicago Crime Lab examined the effects of BAM, they found it was associated with a nearly 50 percent drop in violent-crime arrests among participants. One caveat: The positive effects seemed to fade after teens left the program.

Launched in 2001, BAM now works with thousands of students at more than 100 schools throughout Chicago. A few years ago, the program expanded to Boston.

Directing support to people most likely to commit shootings

" Most crime is committed by a small group of offenders at a small group of places," said David Weisburd, a criminologist who's studied focused deterrence. He added that it's important to look beyond traditional law enforcement methods to bring wraparound resources directly to the people who need them.

More than 80 American cities have implemented focused deterrence since Boston pioneered it as "Operation Ceasefire" in the 1990s. A recent of two dozen evaluations found that the strategy was associated with an overall reduction in crime, including a 63 percent reduction in youth homicides and a 44 percent reduction in youth gun assaults in one high‐risk police district.

Less Tested

Removing guns from those in crisis

Ever since the Parkland shooting, laws that allow judges to seize legally owned weapons from gun owners in crisis have gained traction as a way to stop mass shootings. Collectively known as "red flag" laws, the policies can be used when authorities have evidence that a gun owner or someone in the gun owner's household might harm themself or others.

Only 13 states have red flag laws, most of which were passed after Parkland, and it's difficult to draw definitive conclusions about their effectiveness. But early evidence is promising. One study found that gun seizure laws in Connecticut and Indiana were associated with a decline in suicides . In Maryland, which created its red flag policy after last February's shooting, police estimated that half the seizures stemmed from calls by family members, and one involved a threat against a school. Similarly, Vermont's new red flag law may have stopped a school shooting .

Placing age limits on gun purchases

Federal law allows people as young as 18 to buy rifles and shotguns, even though consumers must be 21 to buy a handgun. In the wake of the Parkland shooting, activists pushed fiercely for gun policy change, including laws that would have barred the perpetrator from being able to buy an AR-15 rifle at the age of 19. Soon after the massacre, the state of Florida banned gun sales to anyone under the age of 21. National chain Dick's Sporting Goods raised its minimum age for gun sales to 21, and a bill to institute a minimum age of 21 for gun purchases was introduced in Congress.

Higher age limits on gun sales are not well studied, especially when it comes to the effect they might have on preventing relatively rare events like mass shootings. RAND's research review found some evidence that raising the minimum age for all gun sales to 21 could reduce youth gun suicide , though the findings were less robust than studies that bolstered support for child-access laws.

Still, experts believe that raising the minimum purchasing age is a promising policy because of the risks associated with guns in the hands of adolescents. As gun-owning Johns Hopkins public policy professor Cassandra Crifasi wrote for The Trace earlier in February , the cognitive abilities of teenagers as old as 18 are still in development. They may not have the same impulse control as someone only a few years older.

No Evidence It Works

Teaching kids not to touch guns

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Saving Kids from Guns: The Most Promising Strategies, According to Experts - The Trace

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Safe storage, red flag laws, group therapy, and focusing on likely offenders can help prevent shootings. To color in the empty spaces these young deaths leave, The Trace and worked with more than 200 student journalists across the country to profile young people lost to guns during the 12 months that started with the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last February 14th.

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After 17 people were killed in Parkland, parents and survivors mobilized. They called their movement Never Again. Then, it happened again.

After the slaughter of 14 students and three adults in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine's Day, parents demanded new laws and students lit up social media. They registered young voters and organized a massive rally called the March For Our Lives.

They called their movement Never Again.

Then it happened again - 94 days later. Eight students and two teachers were mowed down by a gunman at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. And it happened again and again, in dribs and drabs, on street corners, in backyards and in homes: young people obliterated by gunfire.

Jai Gillard, a freshman at Santa Fe High School in Texas, leaves a message on a cross, one of 10 placed in front of the school in honor of the eight students and two teachers killed by a 17-year-old classmate on May 18, 2018, three months after Parkland. Scott Olson Getty Images

The 12-month period starting Feb. 14, 2018, saw nearly 1,200 lives snuffed out. That's a Parkland every five days, enough victims to fill three ultra-wide Boeing 777s. The true number is certainly higher because no government agency keeps a real-time tally and funding for research is restricted by law.

The Trace, an online nonprofit news organization that covers firearms issues, wanted to commemorate those lost lives. It assembled a team of more than 200 journalists - kids themselves - to research and write short portraits of every victim, 18 and under.

On the anniversary of the Parkland massacre, The Trace is publishing those portraits. In conjunction, the Miami Herald and McClatchy are presenting a series of stories on the year in gun violence against children.

Drive-bys to accidents

When they weren't taking cover from school shooters, young Americans died as a result of murder-suicides, jealous rages, indiscriminate drive-bys, targeted attacks and horrific preventable accidents.

Several died in explosive video game disputes. One young man was killed when, according to a witness, a loose gun inside a box he was hauling discharged. A 10-year-old girl was gunned down while scampering toward an ice cream truck. A father shot his 6-year-old girl by accident while cleaning his gun.

Older teens were more commonly victims, followed by small children, ages 2 and 3. Cities were deadlier than rural areas.

Although the data collected didn't include race and ethnicity, it is clear that most victims were minorities in communities awash in firearms.

"This is America. Anyone who wants a gun will be able to obtain one and at competitive prices," said Thomas Hargrove, founder of the Murder Accountability Project, whose searchable website murderdata.org features homicide data and analytic tools. "That's simply the truth."

Most of the killings generated a headline or two before the names were lost amid the repetitive blur of violence. But their families and friends can't forget.

Calvin Harvey, a junior at Northeast High in Macon, Georgia, was cut down by a motorist who rolled past a summer cookout and let loose a spray of bullets. Tyran Carter died when multiple shots tore into the 17-year-old in a friend's backyard in Wichita, Kansas.

Jace Alexander, a toddler of 2 in Fresno, California, was killed while playing with a Sig Sauer pistol left on a bed.

Zack Kempke, 14, was struck in the head by a target shooter's stray bullet while his family drove down a dirt road through an aspen forest in northern Utah, gazing at the gorgeous autumn foliage.

Amon Rice, 17, was cut down in a wild west-style shootout in South Carolina that involved seven guns and 58 shots fired.

Small towns were not spared.

Paxton Edwards, a 3-year-old with wispy blond hair like his mom, lived in a home on Ferris Drive in Price's Corner, a tiny Delaware map dot. Paxton died in that modest house, shot by his father, who in quick succession also shot Paxton's sister, Brinley, 4, his brother, Jacob, 6, their mom, Julie, and himself. All died.

"It doesn't really feel like it is really real, to be honest," said Brian Covenko, the plumber who lives across the street. He makes a point not to look at the house.

Covenko traded occasional text messages with Matthew Edwards and said he saw signs of strife beyond the normal grind of work and raising young children. Yet Edwards fit the general pattern that researchers have found of gunmen who commit what's known as familicide.

"They are mostly non-Hispanic white males - the male who is the father or stepfather of the children," said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor and domestic-violence researcher at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in Baltimore. "The number one risk factor is prior violence against the female." That prior violence often goes unreported.

Paxton, Brinley and Jacob were among 91 children aged 18 and under killed in domestic murder-suicides in the 12 months after Parkland, most by parents.

Some killings seemed to have no rational connection to the person shot. Jada Jones sat in a car in a driveway just outside Rock Hill, South Carolina, a city of 73,000, when drive-by gunfire apparently meant for others took her life at the age of 14.

A month after he graduated from high school, bullets felled 18-year-old honor student Antonio Jones, shot in his sister's car in Kansas City, Missouri, the killer's motives unknown.

Each killing left grieving families, scarred communities and often unanswered questions.

He keeps count

Mark Bryant owns and fires guns, but he doesn't believe nearly 1,200 dead children is an unavoidable byproduct of the right to bear arms, enshrined in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

"That just has always frustrated me, and it goes back to the old saying, 'With freedom comes responsibility,' " said Bryant. A retired computer systems analyst, Bryant started an online database, the Gun Violence Archive, five years ago to provide data, hoping it would lead the way to reasonable restrictions.

The constantly updated archive tracks how many people are shot, how many are killed and their names and ages, how many are wounded, how many are teens, how many are younger, the number of defensive uses of firearms and the number of firearm accidents, fatal and otherwise.

The work has convinced Bryant that there is room for compromise between the pro- and anti-gun forces on measures that will keep firearms out of the hands of irresponsible people.

"I equate it in some ways to what Mothers Against Drunk Driving did with drunk driving," he said. "MADD was against the injuries and deaths that occurred due to people driving while drunk. They were not against cars, they were not against car owners, they were not against alcohol. They were simply against the carnage that was occurring from drunk driving."

When web traffic spikes on the Gun Violence Archive website, it means one of two things: a mass shooting or the death of children. Or both.

Traffic spiked 14-fold after Parkland.

"If we were selling widgets, I'd have been extremely happy," said Bryant, who runs the archive from his home in Lexington, Kentucky. "But it bothers me when we have good days, because it means something bad has happened for a lot of people."

With no federal data to rely on, the Gun Violence Archive was the primary source for the student reporters working under the supervision of The Trace.

A feature, not a bug

The lack of federal research into gun violence is by design. The dearth of data stems in part from something called the Dickey Amendment. Passed in 1996 at the urging of the National Rifle Association, it states that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] may be used to advocate or promote gun control."

If not an outright ban on the researching of gun violence as a health issue, it has certainly discouraged it.

"If this was an epidemic or a polio-like illness and you documented these kinds of fatalities, don't you think there would be a hue and cry that the CDC is not doing everything it could to stop this epidemic?" asked Mark Rosenberg. He was the last person at the CDC to freely research gun violence in the late 1990s as director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and now a leading advocate of trying to restart it.

But there is no sign that will happen. Linda Degutis served as the director of the same center from 2010 to 2014. She saw little movement despite an executive order from President Barack Obama to do more research after the Newtown, Connecticut, rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 20 kids and six staff members in December 2012.

"We had so many restrictions in place on what we could do, I think a lot of those restrictions are still in place," said Degutis, now chief science officer at the Avielle Foundation, named after Avielle Richman, a 6-year-old who died in the Newtown massacre. "You don't see work coming out from the CDC despite what President Obama ordered."

That's in part because government agencies fear retribution from congressional appropriators if they buck the NRA.

Avielle Richman was 6 when she was shot and killed in the Newtown massacre. Her parents, scientists, set up a foundation to search for the causes of such incidents. It is named after Avielle. AP

A spokeswoman for the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action said the group is fine with research but felt in the 1990s it was slanted.

"Safety has been at the core of the NRA mission since its inception," said Amy Hunter. "However, firearm safety is not the goal of the advocates seeking CDC funding - gun control is."

The CDC does maintain the National Vital Statistics System, but it operates with a lag. Currently, 2016 is the last full year for which there is CDC data. That year there were 1,816 homicides involving victims aged 15-19, and 2,117 suicides for the same age group. (Suicides were excluded from The Trace's tally.)

There was no breakdown on weapons used in the homicides, nor methods of suicide. The FBI's annual crime statistics report for 2017 put all homicides, regardless of age, at 16,617 in the United States that year, a hair lower than the 16,651 homicides in 2016.

At the state level, too, there are restrictions on data collection and sharing - including by physicians. State-based "Docs vs. Glocks" laws, pioneered in Florida and challenged in court on First Amendment grounds, have prohibited doctors from asking patients whether they have firearms in the home.

Familicide murders are an example of the need for research. That most recent 2016 data set at the CDC shows 337 cases of family murder-suicides involving a firearm. But it doesn't show how many victims were toddlers, or older teens killed trying to protect their mother from an abusive husband.

"It absolutely matters," said Jacquelyn Campbell, the domestic violence researcher.

Who responded, who didn't

In Parkland's immediate aftermath, state- and locally based gun-safety efforts were galvanized in a way that didn't occur after previous shootings.

"Parkland is the one time where there really has been motion, in part because it became clear that it did not have to occur, that there were policies in place in other states that could have prevented this, and we've seen motion," said Garen Wintemute, an emergency room doctor and professor at the University of California-Davis.

In some states - including firearm-friendly Florida - legislatures lifted the gun-ownership minimum age to 21, at least for certain models. In others, they boosted background checks, and in still others, they allowed temporary court orders designed to prevent at-risk individuals from accessing firearms, called red-flag laws.

Research by the Giffords Law Center, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, found that eight states legalized Extreme Risk Protection Orders after Parkland: Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont.

These protection orders allow family members or law enforcement to ask a court to temporarily restrict someone's access to guns if the person is deemed a risk to themselves or others. Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz fit that profile.

"We're not anti-gun, not anti-Second Amendment. We are for the prevention of gun violence," said Sarah Stowens, echoing the Gun Violence Archive's Bryant. She is head of the Delaware chapter of Moms Demand Action, a group that helped push through the new law in several states.

That national group is patterned after Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

"Parkland was another moment that galvanized people who were sick and tired of being sick and tired," Stowens said of changes in Delaware, which also now restricts bump stocks, add-on devices that allow semiautomatic weapons to fire faster. Bump stocks were used by Stephen Paddock in October 2017 when he fired down from his hotel room on a Las Vegas concert crowd, killing 58 and wounding 851.

Eight states moved to ban bump stocks and similar devices, the Giffords center said. Only New Jersey had done so before Parkland.

There were other efforts on a smaller scale. The Broward County chapter of the League of Women Voters began distributing free gun locks in and around Fort Lauderdale and plans to expand the effort to Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.

That could have saved the life of Jace Alexander, the Fresno 2-year-old who found the firearm on the bed.

In the first three months in Broward County, the league and its 100 partners distributed 6,500 free gun locks to churches, police stations, doctor offices, mental health providers and daycare centers. It is partnering with Moms Demand Action, the Florida Initiative for Suicide Prevention, pediatricians and a host of advocacy groups.

"This thing has taken off like crazy," said Barbara Markley, who started the initiative. "It's nonpartisan. it's not taking away anybody's guns."

If grass-roots change has percolated at the local and state level, the same is not true in Washington.

Despite years of mass shootings - in Thousand Oaks, California, and Aurora, Colorado; at the Washington Navy Yard; and in Newtown, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, Santa Fe and Pittsburgh - the House of Representatives had not held hearings specifically on the issue of gun violence.

As a result of the wave election that flipped control of the House, that drought ended last week.

The House Judiciary Committee on Feb. 6 held its first hearing on gun-violence prevention.

"The epidemic of gun violence in this country is a national crisis and an international embarrassment," Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said in opening the Feb. 6session.

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, an ally of President Donald Trump, soon showed how contentious the debate figures to become. A Panhandle Republican, Gaetz tried to turn the gun hearing into a discussion of illegal immigration and the need for a border wall.

Fred Guttenberg and Manuel Oliver, parents of children killed in Parkland, raised their voices in protest. Gaetz tried to have them tossed from the room.

A week later, two background-check bills passed the panel, advancing to a House floor vote. Although the Republican-held Senate will likely block any new restrictions, gun safety is back in the conversation.

Sen. Kamala Harris, the former prosecutor and California Democrat running for president, said at a town hall last month that Second Amendment absolutists should be forced to confront the reality of gun violence, as manifested by mass shootings like Parkland and Newtown.

"I think somebody should have required all those members of Congress to go in a room - in a locked room, no press, nobody else - and look at the autopsy photographs of those babies," she said. "And then you vote your conscience."
Caitlin Ostroff in Miami contributed to this story.

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12 months, nearly 1,200 deaths: the year in youth gun violence since Parkland

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After 17 people were killed in Parkland, parents and survivors mobilized. They called their movement Never Again. Then, it happened again. After the slaughter of 14 students and three adults in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine's Day, parents demanded new laws and students lit up social media.

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ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN- Rebecca Cunningham has only one kind of memory from her early childhood: violence. Her father shattered mirrors, tore up the house, and beat and threatened to kill her mother. Cunningham, then less than 5 years old, remembers her older sister trying to protect her.

"When my father would start in with my mother, my sister would cover my eyes and try to hide with me behind the couch," recalls Cunningham, now a 48-year-old emergency physician and researcher at the University of Michigan (UM) here. "The police were in and out of the house a lot. If there had been a gun in my home in those years, my mother certainly would have been killed."

One day Cunningham's father, a lawyer, called her mother threatening to kill her. Her mother changed the locks on their New Jersey house. She sent Cunningham's two older siblings to live with a safely distant foster family. And she bought a handgun.

Did that pistol make Cunningham and her mother safer? Public health experts can't answer that question: A 2003 study that examined whether abused women living apart from their abusers are safer with a gun was inconclusive. No study since has delved into the issue.

It's one of myriad questions about firearms and violence that remain unanswered, largely because of a dearth of funding to explore them. Guns are the second-leading cause of death of children and teens in the United States, after motor vehicle crashes. In 2016, the most recent year for which data are available, they killed nearly 3150 people aged 1 to 19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Cancer killed about 1850. But this year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, spent $486 million researching pediatric cancer and $4.4 million studying children and guns, according to its RePORTER database.

That's because gun violence research has been operating under a chill for more than 2 decades. In 1996, Congress crafted an amendment, named for its author, then-Arkansas Representative Jay Dickey (R), preventing CDC-the government's lead injury prevention agency-from spending money "to advocate or promote gun control."

That law was widely interpreted as banning any CDC studies that probe firearm violence or how to prevent it. The agency's gun injury research funding was quickly zeroed out, and other health agencies grew wary. The few dozen firearm researchers who persisted were forced to rely on modest amounts from other agencies or private funders to tackle a massive problem.

Now, there may be early signs of a thaw. In March, in the wake of the mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school, Congress wrote that CDC is free to probe the causes of gun violence, despite the Dickey amendment. (The agency has not done so, citing a lack of money.) And annual firearm-related funding from NIH, according to a search of its RePORTER database, roughly tripled after a 2013 presidential directive that was issued in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Just as importantly, the agency began to flag firearm violence in some of its calls for research.

A heavy toll

Firearms are the second-leading cause of death in children in the United States, after motor vehicle crashes. In the decade ending in 2016, more children died from gun injuries than from cancer.

That's why Cunningham is now in charge of the largest firearm research grant that NIH has awarded in at least 30 years. With $4.9 million from NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), she is co-directing a 5-year project to build capacity for researching firearm injuries in children. Cunningham and UM public health expert Marc Zimmerman are leading 27 scientists at a dozen institutions in work they hope will carry the field forward for years after this funding ends in 2022.

The grant is not designed to answer one particular question. Rather, the goal is to lay out what questions need answering first. The researchers are building a user-friendly archive of existing data and launching pilot studies. And they are training the young scientists who they hope will come after them.

Cunningham's grant "is unique" in U.S.- funded gun violence research, and not just for its size, says Garen Wintemute, a gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis, who co-authored one paper with Cunningham but is not part of this grant. "In the last 20 years this is the first time that an award has been made not just to do a project, but to set up an infrastructure that would allow a lot of projects to be done."

Although gun rights groups continue to insist that public health scientists steer clear of gun violence, some researchers are feeling empowered to push back. Last week, surgeons writing in JAMA Surgery called on CDC to restart its own gun violence research. And last month, the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Fairfax, Virginia, provoked a firestorm when it tweeted that "selfimportant anti-gun doctors" should "stay in their lane." Hundreds of emergency department doctors tweeted back, many including photographs of their scrubs, hands, and shoes bloodied from treating gunshot victims. More than 40,000 health care professionals, including Cunningham, signed an open letter to NRA complaining that the group has hobbled gun violence research, declaring, "This is our lane!"

All the same, there's still little public money for gun research. And given the polarizing politics, Cunningham's team must walk a fine line: probing gun violence without being seen as advocating gun control. But she's betting that this is the beginning of the end of the funding chill. Her forward-looking NIH award "is more than another grant," she says. "[It's] the end of the silencing of a generation of scientists."

In the emergency room

Wearing a white coat and with the requisite stethoscope draped around her neck, Cunningham recently showed visitors around a trauma bay stuffed with monitors, tubing, and tanks at UM's University Hospital, which serves Ann Arbor and its rural surroundings. She works in the emergency department here several times a month. (She is also associate vice president for health sciences research at UM, and the fourth-leading NIH grantee among U.S. emergency room doctors.)

The young trauma patients Cunningham sees here underscore the need for research on guns and children. "The teen suicide survivors that I remember most clearly are kids or young adults who have blown off the front of their face," Cunningham says. "Those are some of the worst trauma patients I have seen because they are awake and utterly miserable. And they are going to have just devastating injuries."

After working her way through college and medical school, Cunningham did her medical residency at UM in the late 1990s. She spent months staffing an emergency department 80 kilometers north in Flint, Michigan, an impoverished city where she saw a different kind of gun violence. After street shootings, she saw victims "shot in the leg, shot in the arm, shot in the belly, shot in the chest ... often multiple gunshot wound victims in one night. More than once, the teen was the second in the family to be killed. I cared for young children caught in crossfire walking to school."

She was often pregnant with one of her three daughters when she had to sit down with a mother to tell her that her child had been shot and killed. It was, she says, "completely senseless."

After her residency, Cunningham began 2 decades of research studying the impacts of violence on youth, but for many years she saw no way to study gun violence in particular. "No mentor of mine would touch it."

In 2010, Cunningham finally published a paper with guns in the title-a survey of handgun access in teens visiting the emergency department in Flint. Four years later, she came across a bigger opportunity.

In August 2014, NIH's child health institute sent out a broad call for team proposals to build research capacity for preventing any prominent cause of childhood injury. As Cunningham read the announcement, one sentence leapt off the page: "Increasingly, attention is being paid to firearm-related injury as a serious public health concern."

She contacted NICHD to make sure she had not misread its intent. She was told she had not. She and Zimmerman's first proposal was sent back for revisions. But on a second try, it received a perfect score from an NIH review panel.

One week later, Donald Trump was elected president. Given that NRA had funneled $30 million to Trump's campaign, NIH officials privately fretted about gun research. "The election makes everything more complicated," one administrator emailed to another. But in September 2017, the grant money arrived, and Cunningham's team went to work, calling itself the Firearm Safety Among Children and Teens (FACTS) Consortium.

Four months later, a 19-year-old former student gunned down 17 students and staff at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. "My inbox was flooded with researchers wanting to join FACTS-even to volunteer," Cunningham says. "The idea that the topic is too political to study is passing with the urgency created after Parkland."

A violent childhood

Cunningham's own sense of urgency predates any news event. "My interest in gun violence prevention has ... roots [in] lived experience," she says. After his wife kicked him out in the mid-1970s, Cunningham's father continued to stalk her and 5-year-old Cunningham, banging on the front door and breaking windows. To escape him, her mother began a series of moves to low-rent apartments in other towns. They relied on food stamps while Cunningham attended four schools in 3 years.

"We were terrified," Cunningham says. "I was scared my mother would be killed. She was scared she would be killed. My father told her not infrequently that he had a gun and would find her." The fear only lifted years later, after her father died.

Cunningham says her early experience helps her "understand that people sometimes buy guns when they think the law cannot protect them."

In late October, Cunningham convened the first in-person meeting of the FACTS team in a daylong event in a UM conference room. The roughly two dozen researchers and handful of trainees present included many of the public health scientists actively doing firearm research today: grizzled epidemiologists who are still standing after the 22-year funding drought; surgeons-in-training; data mavens; and clinical psychologists such as Rinad Beidas, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has been studying whether and how counseling parents on gun safety could be incorporated into routine pediatric visits.

"The overarching purpose here is how to rebuild the field," Cunningham told the meeting as it opened. "We want more firearm researchers at the end of this who know what they are doing."

Their animating principle is that gun violence, like any other public health bane, can be tackled scientifically, divorced from any political agenda. "There is a science to injury prevention," Cunningham says. She and others note that decades of studies on motor vehicle safety led to evidence-based policies such as car seat and seat belt laws, which have dramatically reduced childhood motor vehicle fatalities even though many more cars are on the road.

In the case of firearms, Cunningham says, "the person, the gun, the home environment-all are modifiable in some way or another. We have not even started to try to address the ways that make the combination safer."

The scientists discussed 10 candidate pilot projects over 5 hours; Cunningham and Zimmerman will soon decide which will move forward.

One project proposes to enlist focus groups of gun owners to craft effective safe storage messages, aiming to curb teen suicide in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In such rural areas, the rate of suicide by gun is almost twice that in urban areas of the United States. Another proposed study, a survey, would separately ask teens and their gun-owning parents how accessible the household's guns are, to reality check parents' views.

A third proposal makes the chilling assumption that it won't be long until the next mass school shooting. In its aftermath, Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, would study young people's use of social media to characterize post-traumatic stress and anxiety, as well as resilience. Fewer than 1% of gun deaths in children and teens occur in schools. But Ranney believes school shootings may have much broader mental health impacts.

Cunningham, who radiates both affability and the decisiveness of a seasoned emergency physician, ran the meeting as part pep talk, part crash assignment. She shut down digressions and poured on doses of budget reality when suggestions got too ambitious. "This is not a democracy, as I tell my children," she reminded the group.

Given the constraints imposed by the congressional amendment, Cunningham and her team are at pains to emphasize that they are not coming after anybody's guns. The official NIH project description promises to respect "gun ownership as an important part of the cultural fabric of U.S. society."

Cunningham is blunt: "Our goals are not political. We are not aiming to decrease total gun numbers. We respect Second Amendment rights."

A generation of scarcity

During the past 22 years, public funding for gun violence research has been modest. Private funders have tried to compensate.

FOIA/NIH; NIH REPORTER DATABASE

The team has signed up gun-owning stakeholders to advise them. These include groups like Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership, based in Lake Grove, Oregon, and individuals like James Berlin, police chief and former SWAT team leader in the Detroit suburb of Roseville, Michigan.

Berlin, in a phone interview, said he has turned down other research groups over the years because "it seemed like they were trying to find facts that fit their foregone conclusions." Cunningham's team struck him differently. "They are actually trying to get the answers" on pediatric gun deaths, he says, "so it doesn't happen in the future." He adds of Cunningham: "She made me feel like my opinion mattered."

But hard-line gun rights groups have refused to work with the team. Only "the most tame" groups have signed on, David Hemenway, a veteran injury prevention researcher at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, said at the meeting.

"It's year one," Cunningham replied. "There's more time for more voices." But she acknowledged that local and national NRA chapters had failed to return her team's repeated phone messages and emails. (NRA also did not respond to Science's repeated requests for comment for this article.) The National Shooting Sports Foundation in Newtown, the gun industry's trade association, declined to sign on because of "concern about the 'public health' focus," Bill Brassard, the group's senior communications director, wrote in refusing Cunningham's request.

In a statement provided to Science last month, Brassard added, "Though we do not oppose research per se, too often 'research' from some in the public health field is biased and designed to advance a predetermined antigun policy outcome. ... Gun-related violence is largely a criminal justice matter and not a public health issue."

An uncertain future

For a woman who began life at more risk than most for gun violence, Cunningham has landed well. She divorced-because "marriages are miracles"-then remarried and now co-commands a blended family of five teenagers. She lives on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, on a forested lot with a chicken coop overseen by her daughters. Her 77-year-old mother, who is also happily remarried, lives nearby. She still has the gun, stored away, unloaded.

Like many U.S. parents, Cunningham finds her own children affected by gun violence. "My kids come home after those shootings and they are terrified in school."

But despite powerful public reaction to school shootings, some experts are not as sanguine about the future of gun research as Cunningham. "I don't see this as a turning point," says David Studdert, a health policy expert at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, California, who's not part of the FACTS project. And pediatrician Fred Rivara, a FACTS team member and veteran firearm researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, worries about future funding for his young trainees.

However, Wintemute, who has studied gun violence for 30 years, thinks this may be a watershed moment. He notes Cunningham's grant and other new money-his group recently received a $5 million award from the state of California-plus the groundswell of physician activity on Twitter. "It's entirely possible that this is the beginning of a new mobilization," he says.

Cunningham is confident that the problem of gun violence can be solved with science-and with participation from all sides. So, she keeps searching for common ground. "We are not having any conversations here that are an 'us and them' narrative," she told scientists at the meeting. "We are about reducing kids dying."

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Guns kill more U.S. kids than cancer. This emergency physician aims to prevent those firearm deaths

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ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN- Rebecca Cunningham has only one kind of memory from her early childhood: violence. Her father shattered mirrors, tore up the house, and beat and threatened to kill her mother. Cunningham, then less than 5 years old, remembers her older sister trying to protect her.