What if we treated gun crime as a disease?

Amid all the verbal furor over gun rights and crime, at least one state is having some success by treating gun crime as a disease. However, most states won’t be able to follow suit.

Writing in the May/June issue of Pacific Standard, senior editor Vince Beiser discusses the Armed Prohibited Persons System, a program in which California officials comb through mountains of data to find people who have lost the right to own guns, then send agents to take those guns away. According to Beiser, “The agents are looking for people who bought guns legally but were later convicted of a felony, put under a restraining order or were deemed seriously mentally ill—any of which bar them from owning a firearm.”

In California, that list includes almost 20,000 people who hold more than 38,000 handguns and 1,600 assault weapons. Last year, agents with the California Bureau of Firearms confiscated more than 2,000  illegally owned weapons.

This information exists in part because of the work of Garen Wintemute, a doctor and researcher at the University of California, Davis Medical Center. “He is one of a number of academics and activists,” writes Beiser, “trying to get people to look at gun violence not just as a criminal-justice issue but as a public-health one.”

“Whether it’s cancer or traffic accidents, you ask the same questions,” says Wintemute. “You identify the high-risk groups and then look for interventions.”

One such high-risk group is pistol-owning ex-cons. “People with serious felony records are barred nationwide from owning guns,” Beiser writes, “but research shows that such folks are nonetheless relatively likely to commit new crimes—with a gun.”

Statistics support this. Federal data show that about 40 percent of felons surveyed who were convicted of gun-related offenses were prohibited from owning firearms when they committed the offense. Researchers studying people charged with homicides in Illinois found similar results.

This probably doesn’t surprise anyone. What the prohibited-persons program does is pretty straightforward: It enforces existing laws by taking the guns away. And apparently, this works.

Wintemute and a team of researchers gathered records on people who bought handguns before a ban took effect in 1990 and those who tried to buy handguns after the ban but were turned down. Over the next three years, the researchers found, “the risk of committing new nonviolent crimes was about identical [for both groups],” Beiser writes. “But in the group that was banned from buying handguns, the risk of new gun and/or violent crimes went down by about 30 percent.”

These kinds of results have a bipartisan appeal. The bill that created the program was introduced by a Republican and was supported by the National Rifle Association.

Wintemute estimates that as many as 180,000 people nationwide should be on a prohibited-persons list, but it’s unlikely other states will set up similar programs. Why? “California is essentially the only state that has the data to make the program possible,” Beiser writes.

For example, he writes, “California allows only licensed retailers to sell handguns—there’s no ‘gun-show loophole’—and has recorded those sales since 1996.” And don’t expect the federal government to set up a centralized gun-tracking system. It’s prohibited by law from doing so.

While rhetoric flies around social media about gun rights, and though gun crime is a complex issue, there are rational approaches that have proven helpful in reducing it. Unfortunately, rationality rarely prevails in our polarizing culture.