"Gun violence kills tens of thousands of US citizens annually, but the basics of this social disease have never been rigorously examined
GUN violence kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year. Yet the basic characteristics of this modern social disease have never been studied in a rigorous way, according to a damning report by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
It found that key intervention policies such as gun ownership laws and strategies for firearms education are based on poorly gathered or incomplete data and badly designed trials. This means there are few established facts about the cause-and-effect relationship between guns and many types of violence, or the effectiveness of gun control or educational programmes intended to steer young people away from firearms. 'While there is a large body of empirical research on firearms and violence, there is little consensus on even the basic facts about these important policy issues,' the report says. "
