Message on Las Vegas Shooting from Dean Williams

Dear members of the Harvard Chan School community,

I write to you on the occasion of yet another senseless tragedy. Sunday night’s shooting on the Las Vegas Strip—the most lethal in modern U.S. history—claimed the lives of at least 59 people, injured more than 500, and shook the public health community to its core.

We join with people across the country in mourning the loss of life. But it is not enough to mourn.

Almost as appalling as the massacre itself is the fact that our nation has turned away from research of the kind required to devise solutions to a public health crisis responsible for more than 30,000 fatalities annually. Federal funding for gun violence research has been effectively stifled for more than two decades—an act of willful neglect that has left us with far less understanding than we ought to have on the causes of gun violence and what works to prevent it. As authors Stark and Shah pointed out in a January 2017 JAMA Research Letter, “In relation to mortality rates, gun violence research was the least-researched cause of death.”

Despite a 20-year stranglehold on federal funding, public health researchers, including our own David Hemenway and his colleagues at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, have clearly shown that the availability of guns leads to more homicide and more suicide.

Researchers have also shown that public health measures can make a difference. As Hemenway pointed out in a Boston Globe op-ed yesterday, Australia enacted strict control laws and a buy-back program after the horrific Port Arthur massacre in 1997. “Australia had had 13 gun massacres in the two decades leading up to the law change,” writes Hemenway. “[I]n the two decades since, they have had none.” Similarly, when Britain restricted access to guns following the Dunblane school massacre in 1996, it saw significant long-term reductions in gun violence.

It is time to remove the restrictions and allow federally funded research on gun violence to resume. It is our duty, as a community of public health scholars and professionals, to demand the means to get to work on this crisis. If we are serious about preventing the next mass shooting, this is the least we can do.

Sincerely,

Michelle A. Williams, ScD
Dean of the Faculty
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health