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Last week, a gunman opened fire in a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, Maine, killing 18 people and injuring 13 others. The shooting was the deadliest in the United States this year.
Through the RAND Gun Policy in America initiative, our researchers have been seeking to better understand the country’s enduring problem with gun violence. They’ve reviewed thousands of studies to learn what scientific evidence says—and doesn’t say—about the effects of gun policies.
One of those RAND researchers, Rosanna Smart, was quoted in TIME magazine this week about the Lewiston shooting. She noted that, while there’s limited evidence to show which laws prevent mass shootings specifically, bans on high-capacity magazines appear to reduce the number of deaths in mass shootings. Beyond addressing these horrifying events, Smart said that reducing overall gun deaths in the United States will require preventing firearm suicides.
Smart also recently appeared in a RAND explainer video on this topic. She highlighted which gun policies are supported by evidence; discussed what created the current evidence gap that she and her colleagues are striving to fill; and, crucially, warned that the absence of evidence that a policy will work is not the same thing as the existence of evidence that the policy won’t work.
“Policymakers who want to address gun violence may need to rely on logic or weaker evidence until the science and data catches up,” she said.
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