A blueprint for reducing gun violence by 2040, according to experts

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A blueprint for reducing gun violence by 2040, according to experts

Shootings have killed more than 800,000 people and injured over 2 million others in the United States since the start of this century. In March, dozens of violence prevention leaders convened in Chicago at the JAMA Summit on Reducing Firearm Violence and Harms to discuss steps to reduce gun violence, according to a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The report, published on Nov. 3, shows that the 60 leaders who attended the summit represented multiple disciplines. They included emergency physicians, public health scholars, psychiatrists, historians, and social workers. The summit was the first of its kind presented by the medical journal. Its purpose: to develop a roadmap for substantially curtailing the number of shooting deaths and injuries over the next 15 years.

“We’ve gained a lot of knowledge and can point to a variety of things that seem to reduce gun violence, but still, there’s a lot we don’t know, and there’s still a lot of challenges,” Daniel Webster, a public health scholar at Johns Hopkins University who has studied gun violence for over 30 years, told The Trace.

Gun violence as a major public health issue has received more attention and federal funding in recent years. In 2024, then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued his office’s first-ever warning about gun violence’s far-reaching effects, reinvigorating prevention efforts.

But since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration has rolled back much of that progress. Layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have decimated the unit responsible for studying and helping to prevent shootings, and federal funding for research and community programs has dwindled.

During the summit, leaders called for a “research revolution” on preventing gun-related harms as one of the five steps needed to improve public safety by 2040, according to the report. The other steps emphasized strengthening communities, reframing gun injury as a preventable issue, taking a whole-of-government and society approach to addressing violence, and harnessing regulatory and technological opportunities responsibly.

Dr. Stephen Hargarten, an emergency physician and professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has spent his career studying how regulatory and technological innovation can help reduce firearm deaths. He spoke about the firearm lethality index, a new metric to measure the deadliness of different guns and bullets, something that could help policymakers better decide how to respond to varying levels of harm.

“We wanted to look at how technologies and innovation affect things like suicide rates, homicides, and firearm thefts,” and whether something like a smart gun could play a role in reducing gun-related harms, Hargarten told The Trace. He also explained to the other leaders how Congress could empower federal regulators to require certain safety features in firearms. “As it stands, they don’t have oversight, and we feel that that’s something for us to be looking at.”

The report on the summit lays out several approaches that research has shown reduce firearm deaths, many of which The Trace has covered over the past 10 years. They included firearm policies, community violence intervention programs, environmental changes, alcohol policies, socioeconomic policies, and policing interventions.

The report also noted that, even though homicide rates have declined over the past two years, more people believe that crime is increasing. More effective research and communication are needed to combat these misconceptions, the report argues. It is a dark and challenging time for Americans “who care about public health and reducing gun violence,” Nick Wilson, a summit participant and the senior director for gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress, said in an email.

“The summit reaffirmed my optimism that we will get through this and rebuild our institutions stronger than ever,” Wilson said. “It will help build support for future federal action by demonstrating what works.”

This story was produced by The Trace and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.