By Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - When three researchers whose studies showed gun injuries
and deaths were costing Americans billions of dollars a year, all three
refrained from advocating gun control as they investigated potential
solutions.
Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute for Research and
Evaluation first studied the costs of gunshot wounds in 1994 and then
again in December after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. He
determined that costs had only risen in the 20 years since his first
study.
But, Miller said, "I'm a researcher, not an advocate."
Manish
Sethi, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville,
studied the connections between gunshot wound victims and Medicaid
recipients and found that many patients said they didn't know how to
stop gun violence before it happened.
His research, Sethi said,
showed that one way to stop violence was to teach young people how to
keep disagreements from escalating. "We talk to them about talking trash
about your friends - how do you want to handle it?" he said. "Children
just don't know how to deal with confrontation."
"Black-and-white solutions are never the answer," Sethi said of tighter gun controls. "We need an alternative path."
Jean
Lemaire of the University of Pennsylvania determined in 2005 that
insurance rates would drop with a reduction in shooting injuries. The
life expectancy for Americans is lower than in other Western nations
because of the shooting deaths of young people, he said.
In
Belgium, where Lemaire is from, the government conducted a mandatory gun
buy-back program a couple of years ago. Belgium is ranked third for
life expectancy, he said.
"I'm not suggesting that," he said. "I don't have a solution."
While
Miller said he was still looking for answers to scale back the higher
costs of gun violence, he was encouraged by two recent developments.
President
Obama's January executive order overruling a 1996 law prohibiting the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying gun violence is
the first, Miller said. It means the CDC was now free to do comparative
research on the data it has collected. Miller's 1994 study was
supported by a grant from the National Institute of Justice. Second,
Obama issued another order that clarifies that doctors can talk to their
patients about gun ownership.