Do assault weapons bans work?

I'm John Glenn Hill. This is the Weeds and a quick content warning up top. Today's episode is about gun violence and mass shootings. Please listen with care. I was eight the first time I remember it happening. Right now SWAT teams and the bomb squad are inside Columbine High School making a second sweep of that building. But it turns out it wasn't an anomaly. It happened again. At this afternoon hour at least 30 people believed to be killed on the campus of Virginia Tech University. And again to a school shooting at an elementary school in Newtown. It's roughly two hours. And again. And again. I have an awful scene playing out today in Texas. An active shooter for a time at an elementary school in Uvoldi, Texas. This is about 80 miles outside of San Antonio. There is work that can't be. And it just keeps happening. Whenever these tragedies happen we always ask, will this be the moment that things change? And almost every time nothing does. But last year after the shooting in Uvoldi, Texas, Congress passed the first piece of federal gun legislation in almost 30 years. The bill includes enhancing background checks for gun buyers under 21. Closing the so-called boyfriend loophole which would prevent people convicted of domestic violence from owning guns and providing funding for school security and mental health programs. It stops short of banning or raising the age to buy AR-15 style guns. But here we are. Again. At least three children are reported dead after a shooting at Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville. The Metro Nashville Police Department. Often in mass shootings, assault style weapons are used. And after these tragedies, gun reform advocates often renew the call to ban these kinds of weapons. But there was a time when we did have a federal assault weapons ban. So today we're hopping in the weeds time machine and going back to 1994 to talk about how this ban passed in the first place and why it's so hard to tell if it worked. And we're going with one of the preeminent scholars on guns and gun violence. I am Professor Adam Winkler at UCLA School of Law and the author of Gun Fight, the battle over the right to bear arms in America. So the assault weapons ban was part of the 1994 crime bill. What exactly did the ban do? The 1994 assault weapons ban prohibited the sale of certain types of firearms defined as assault weapons. These were listed by make and model or identified by certain characteristics such as semi automatic rifle with a detachable magazine and two or more military style features. The law was designed to target these weapons that are associated with military use and their high capacity magazines, which hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. This was a ban, but it didn't necessarily ban people from owning assault weapons. What did it do? That's right. The 1994 assault weapons ban, grandfathered in existing weapons that were already owned by civilians. So if you had one of these prohibited firearms before the ban went into effect, you were allowed to keep it. The ban was effectively a prohibition on the sale of these kinds of firearms. You've mentioned the military characteristics of guns and those being bans. What kinds of characteristics were banned at the time? Well, the assault weapons ban targeted semi automatic weapons that had a detachable magazine and had two or more military style characteristics such as a pistol grip, a folding or telescoping stock, a bayonet mount or a flash hider. Now these were characteristics that were commonplace on military style weapons, but were targeted nonetheless by this law as things that made assault weapons much more dangerous. Of course, when we look at these characteristics, it's really hard to be persuaded that those characteristics themselves were associated with the weapon. They were associated with a lot of violence. For instance, whether or not a firearm has a bayonet mount or a flash hider, it's probably not going to be closely associated with the amount of violence or death and destruction that can be caused by that firearm. So what was the impact on manufacturers? Because I think when you talk about a gun ban, I know in my mind I automatically think to how that's impacting consumers, but the gun lobby is huge, gun companies are huge. What was the impact for them? Well, for the gun companies, it required them to do a little bit of innovation so that they could try to sell the exact same weapons. To get around the law, the manufacturers simply made the exact same firearms, but just with fewer of the military style characteristics. And these firearms became immensely popular and millions of them were sold despite the fact that the ban was in effect. Can you tell us about the political climate that gave us the ban? I mean, it's hard to imagine something like this ever passing now. Back in 1994, there was much more willingness, especially among Republicans, to support gun safety reform. We saw around the same time the adoption of the Brady background check bill that required background checks for the sale of firearms by gun dealers. And we saw this military style assault weapons ban and high capacity magazine ban made part of federal law. There was real concern about mass shootings at the time. And the NRA, although it was obviously a political powerhouse, didn't quite have the hold on the Republican Party that it has today. And so the assault weapons ban and the Brady background check law were supported by a good number of lawmakers from both parties. The assault weapons ban was set in 2004. Why was that? Well, when the law was adopted, supporters accepted a compromise that included a 10-year sunset of the law. That is to say that after 10 years, the law would no longer be in effect. And if Congress wanted to continue to ban assault weapons, it would have to pass a new law in 2004. However, by 2004, the politics around guns were already shifting and pretty radically. President George W. Bush expressed support for renewing an assault weapons ban, but Republicans in Congress were dead set against renewing the law. And the law ended up sunsetting and no new law was passed in its place. What changed between 1994 and 2004? Why wasn't the political will there that time around? By 2004, the gun issue was becoming much more partisan than it had been. Previously, you had Republicans and Democrats in support of gun safety reform. And you had some Republicans and Democrats opposed to gun safety reform. But the political parties were realigning, and we were finding much more uniform support or opposition to gun laws by the two different political parties. And by 2004, most Republicans had realized that support for gun safety reform would hurt them in primary elections, where the more extreme voters of both parties tend to show up. The NRA during this time also became a more active political force. Although the NRA has been active in politics really since the 1960s, the NRA became much more determined to defeat any new gun safety laws. And the assault weapons ban was one of the first to fall. America has a very unique and long history with guns and gun ownership. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, Americans have always had the right to own guns. Sometimes that has been recognized by courts, but even when it's not been recognized by courts, it's been a matter of fact that lawmakers just haven't prohibited Americans from owning guns. The way lawmakers in Japan, for instance, or South Korea, or England, or France have banned people from owning guns. America has been a heavily armed society for a long, long time, and it's not just because of the Second Amendment. It's because of a general political attitude that people, especially people in rural communities, should have access to firearms for personal protection. At the same time, while we've always had a right to bear arms, we've also always had gun safety legislation. And it's important to recognize that even the founding fathers who wrote the Second Amendment had gun safety laws, and gun safety laws have been an important part of American history, too. One thing I think it's important to recognize is that you can have a right to bear arms and good and effective gun safety laws. We just need to work a little bit harder to find that proper balance. Why don't we have that balance? Where is the disconnect happening for Americans? I think the disconnect is not about guns, but about American politics. Guns are just one issue among very many that really divide Americans. And on most of these issues, because of that divide, we don't see significant reform. So it's not really a gun problem as much as guns are representative of a larger problem in American politics, which is that we just can't find the ability to compromise right now on the big issues that divide us. Adam Winkler is a professor at UCLA School of Law. All right, now we know what the 94-band was and how it happened. Next up, did it work? This episode of The Weeds is brought to you by Wondrium. Wondrium is a massive educational platform loaded with documentaries, immersive series, lessons, basic how-to guides, and a lot more. There are over 8,000 hours of expert-led, easy-to-follow videos that cover just about everything you could obsess over. 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What have you got? Okay, first, you interview smart, powerful people like Hillary Clinton, Mark Benioff, and Stacey Abrams. Second, you grill them harder than most people would dare. And third, the podcast will make you think, it'll make you laugh, and it'll make you smarter. How's that? That's like five things, but good enough. On With Cara Swisher, wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back. This is the Weeds. So, we've laid out the basics of the 1994 Assault Weapons ban, and now it's time to get into its impact. The thing is, the data we do have is complicated, which makes finding out what affected had on gun violence difficult to suss out. So, we reached out to an organization that's conducted in-depth analysis of those numbers. My name is Andrew Morrell, and I'm a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. I run our gun policy and America initiative. I asked Andrew to lay out what the numbers were looking like back when the ban was enacted. The country was just passing the peak of firearms violence and homicides, which was around 1993. And so, there was a lot of concern about firearms and violence, especially in the cities. The crack cocaine epidemic had been burning hard for a number of years. And there was a lot of motivation to change the laws in ways that might reduce some of that violence. So, how did the number change during the decade that the ban was placed? Did things change? Well, this is controversial. It turns out it's hard to evaluate what the effects of this ban were. I think most researchers now believe that the ban had probably mixed effects on gun violence. It may have reduced the use of assault weapons in gun crimes, but that seems to have been compensated for by other kinds of crimes. It didn't have an obvious effect on mass shootings, for instance. Although when the ban lapsed in 2004, mass shootings did start increasing and the share of those shootings that used assault weapons rose dramatically. I want to talk about gun-related crimes. I mean, you talked about mass shootings, and they understandably get a lot of attention. I mean, they're these large, tragic, really scary events, but they aren't that common compared to a lot of other crimes. What do most of the shootings in the country look like? More than 50% of shootings are with handguns. Almost two-thirds of shootings are suicides. So, the shootings that involve a rifle is less than 4%. And assault weapons would be a subset of those. Can you talk about the popularity of assault weapons? Do we have a breakdown of, you know, what kind of weapons most Americans own? So, there are some estimates. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that there's about 20 million assault weapons in private hands right now. So, they are a very popular weapon. Their popularity has been rising since the ban was suspended. And something like 20% of firearm owners own one now. So, they're very common. Have we seen that change over the years, or has that sort of been consistent? The attraction of these weapons that are called assault weapons, the gun industry doesn't call them assault weapons. Oh, what do they call them? They call them modern supporting rifles. And they would argue that an assault rifle is an automatic weapon like you would give to a soldier. And so, they want to draw that distinction. There's the million-dollar question of, did the 94 assault weapons ban have an impact on gun fatalities and sort of, you know, we're not sure. Why aren't we sure of the impact we had? What's going on with that data? There's a few reasons why it's really hard to evaluate this. One is that it might take a long time for a ban like the assault weapons ban to have an effect. Because, you know, one thing we know for sure is that when the ban was announced that, you know, it was going to go in effect later that year, people ran out and bought these weapons. Because it allowed for weapons to be grandfathered. If you already had one of these weapons, you could keep it. And if you had one of these large capacity magazines, you could keep it. So, there was a huge surge in sales of these weapons right before it went into effect. You could almost imagine that the effect of the law might be to increase the number of these kinds of weapons, at least in the short run. And so that creates a kind of confusing effect that's hard to tease out. There are other factors that make it hard to look at this. One thing is that, you know, I mentioned that 1993 was the peak of firearms homicides in the country. And for two decades, they declined after that. So the ban coincided with a period when all kinds of violence, including, you know, rapes and assaults and other kinds of violence, were declining. And so you have to somehow tease out whether any reductions in mass shootings or gun crimes with these kinds of weapons can be attributed to the law versus the law. The law versus to this general trend that was occurring in society. I think what a lot of people expect and hope with an assault weapons ban is that they would cut into mass shootings, in particular. There's all kinds of difficulties studying the effects of laws on mass shootings. One is that they're statistically kind of rare. Depending on how you define them, we maybe had six or maybe 300 or 500 mass shootings last year. And so if you're using a very restrictive definition, like mass shootings that involve four or more fatalities, not including the shooter that occur in a public place that don't involve another felony crime or domestic violence, then you're talking about a fairly statistically rare event. And so it's very lumpy and over time, how many of these are occurring. And so in order to see a law effect on that kind of noisy data, it would have to be very, very large, probably larger than we could expect from an assault weapons ban. So that's sort of statistical problem with isolating the effect. There's also problems with, as I was mentioning, defining what a mass shooting is. People have lots of different definitions. There is no standard government definition of that. There's no data sets that collect this information systematically or at least comprehensively. So people rely on data collected by individuals or private organizations or other data sources like that. And none of them are comprehensive. They are all missing key events. So you can get a lot of different answers depending on your definitions than the data you use. I think of the lack of data and it also sort of reminds me, you know, the Washington Post has that big database of, you know, officer involved shootings or, you know, there are just, there are these huge gaps in data in American policy. And I'm curious why we have that gap in gun data in particular. It's very frustrating for researchers like me who are trying to understand the effects of these laws. I don't have a good answer for this. I suspect that, you know, in some cases it's because it's controversial for the government to be collecting information about firearms and firearms violence. Basic data like how many people own guns is not systematically collected almost 20 years ago when the federal government did ask that question on one of its flagship surveys of risk factors. And so even today, research on gun policy often uses data that's almost 20 years old on gun ownership rates. We haven't invested very much in this as a country. And I think it's one of the things that makes it very hard to do research in this area. Another example is firearm injuries. Most people believe firearm injuries are, you know, more common than firearm deaths. But we don't have good information about how many firearm injuries there are in the US at the state level, for instance, over time. So that makes it that much harder to identify the effects of gun laws on an outcome like that. Could you talk to us a little bit about the 1996 Dickey amendment and maybe the role that could possibly play in all of this? So what happened was the CDC was doing some research on gun ownership and what the effects of having a gun in your home are. And the research that was finding that people who had a gun in the home were more likely to die of a gunshot wound. And that created a lot of pushback by advocacy organizations. Gun rights groups felt that that research was biased somehow. Although I will say that there's lots of research that has been done quite recently that seems to verify what was found back then. And so there was pushback and Congress got involved and Jay Dickey had his name on a bill that required that the government that CDC in particular no longer perform any what they called advocacy research. And they also rescinded an amount of the CDC's budget equal to what they have been spending on all firearms research. So I didn't say you couldn't do research, but it did say can't do advocacy research. CDC didn't think they had been doing advocacy research, but they got the message and the message was this is the third rail. We can't touch this kind of work. By about 2010 that Dickey amendment had been brought into every appropriations bill since 1996. It was expanded to include NIH. And we actually still have it today. Even though in 2019 Congress voted to start funding gun violence research. They kept the Dickey amendment. The theory was that the Dickey amendment offered some sort of guardrails so that the bad advocacy research of the past would never occur again. It would only be straight objective research going forward with this money. I want to dig into this data because one of the things that I find really interesting about numbers is that once you have the data. People are going to come to their own conclusions about what it says. Research on firearms violence is really controversial and a lot of people are very suspicious of it. When you look at surveys of what are the most controversial science policy questions. It's climate change, guns, and then immunizations. It's things like that. And so there's a large swath of the public and policymakers who are skeptical of research in this area and think that I think very often feel that research that draws conclusions different than their priors is probably biased. I don't think that's true. I think that there's a lot of very good objective research going on right now. How do you all at Rand get this data? It's some of the most comprehensive gun data that we have. How do you go about collecting it? The project that I lead the gun policy and America project at Rand. Our goal is to assemble information on what we do and don't know about gun policies with the objective of informing the public and policymakers so that they can create sensible, effective laws that are fair. And we do it in several different ways. One thing we do is we maintain a systematic review of all the research on the effects of gun laws. This is not just the effects on mass shootings and suicides and homicides, but also on outcomes of concern to gun owners. How do these laws affect people's ability to defend themselves or how does it affect the industry? We have this ongoing systematic review of all the research that's going on. And that's basically a literature review. In terms of assembling data, one of the things that's useful for us in our own research and other researchers is we have a gun law database, a state gun law database we've been pulling together. It's got thousands of laws in it, and we make it available to the public. It turns out it's kind of hard to assemble this, and we're still making error corrections. It's not something you can just Google, it turns out, to figure out when states had laws and didn't have laws. Sometimes it requires actually going to a state law library to find out some of this stuff. We have assembled that data set ourselves. Other data sets we've estimated. So, for instance, I mentioned before that we don't have good data that's less than 15 years old on gun ownership, but we have developed models of gun ownership using available information that we can assemble. And so we've published a data set of gun ownership over time at the state level. We've got a new one coming out soon that does that and breaks it down by demographic subgroups. We've got another data set we created out of a model again of firearm injuries at the state level. So some of this is information that we just have collected, some of this information we've produced, and we share it online. Okay, so that's the state of the data on guns. Up next, what do we do with it? Shakira is one of the most listened to pop stars in the world. However, she hasn't had a top 10 hit on the hot 100 in 15 years. Until she borrowed a page from the pop playbooks of Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo. These artists' abilities to be referential and diaristic have created a kind of conspiracy within the pop music world. To create a top 10 hit today, a song can't just be an earworm. It needs to be a meta textual device. And on their hit song Shakira, B-Set App Music Sessions, Volume 53, Shakira and B-Set App adopt a similar mode of song craft. They layer their track with references to old hits like She-Wolf, Scorched Earth lyrics about Shakira's famous X, and shift the song genre from disco to regga-ton to hip hop, pulling in different audiences along the way. It all adds up to a pop music conspiracy theory, and if you're looking to debunk it, listen to our most recent episode of Switch On Pop. ♪ Hey, we're back, and this is The Weeds. We're talking with Andrew Morrell of the Rand Corporation about gun data. So, Andrew, before the break, you mentioned the state-by-state database you all have. One of the things that I find really interesting about American public policy is that it can be very piecemeal because of the authority that states have. But are there any trends that we're seeing right now? Yeah, the trends we've been seeing for a while, I think are still on... Oh, there's a big random variable, which is this Bruin decision by the Supreme Court in last summer. It has sort of a wild card and everything. Yeah, can you talk about that a little bit? So, in the summer of 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Bruin that shell issue laws... This is a kind of concealed carry law where law enforcement has to provide a concealed carry permit to anyone who's qualified to carry gun. That those have to be the law of the land now, and that meant that states like New York and California and several others had to change their lives. They had to change the way they were issuing concealed carry permits, had to make it much more available. But in making that change, they also made some very fundamental changes to the way that Second Amendment cases would be evaluated in the future. And this has had big ramifications. In particular, what they said was that the primary consideration in whether a law violates the Second Amendment is just whether there's a history and tradition of such a law... And a particular history and tradition from early American history. And that's tricky. And we didn't have assault weapons in early American history. We had muskets. And we didn't have the same kinds of laws around domestic violence. So, we didn't have all kinds of things are different now. And so, there's a big question about how you apply this new standard for evaluating Second Amendment cases. And I'm not an expert on this, but I'm aware that there have been a lot of cases brought in state and federal courts now since the Bruin decision. They're calling into questions and very fundamental firearm laws that we've had on the books for a long time. What's the trend we're seeing in the states right now? Like, how are things leaning overall across the country? So, the trend we've seen for a long time and which we continue to see is that blue states, mostly coastal states, are trying to impose more restrictive firearm laws. And red states are trending in the opposite direction towards more and more permissive laws. So, you know, in the last 20 years or so, standard ground laws have become very, very popular in more than half of all states. So, what we would call a permissive law makes it easier to use guns in a confrontation. The Permettless Carry is another law that has been very popular in red states. Meanwhile, in blue states and some purple states, the trend has been going in the other direction. So, Illinois just passed an assault weapons ban this year, and that makes it, I think, the eighth state to have such a ban. Washington is well on its way to potentially passing an assault weapons ban. And states like New York and California are exploring what they can do about the the brewing decision, looking at ways of making concealed carry less common than it might otherwise be if they didn't make further adjustments after brewing. In the wake of the shooting at the Covenant School, there have been renewed calls for an assault weapons ban. We've even heard it from the President. So, I again call on Congress the passive assault weapons ban, passive. It should not be a partisan issue. Why are we seeing a focus on this particular piece of gun policy? If you know, the numbers don't show that it necessarily has that big of an impact. The numbers don't show that it doesn't have an impact. It's just very hard to say whether it does or doesn't. And I think for a lot of people, the fact that the use of assault weapons started rising after the ban expired is fairly persuasive evidence for them that the ban could be helpful. I think that there's a kind of logical argument, particularly around high capacity magazine bans, which are usually part of assault weapons bans, that if you can't fire as many bullets as rapidly, you probably can't hurt as many people as rapidly. And so, I think there's a lot of attraction to those high capacity magazine bans on logical grounds. In our review of evidence, we say that the effect of assault weapons bans is inconclusive right now at this point. But we say that the evidence on high capacity magazine bans is, there's some limited evidence that it reduces mass shootings. And so, there is some evidence for that. I think that the high capacity magazine bans are also potentially more effective in that they don't just apply to the limited group of assault weapons that are not allowed to be able to use assault weapons. That cannot be used in crimes, anyhow. But they apply to any weapon that can have a detachable magazine or a fixed magazine with more than 10 or 15 rounds of ammunition. And so, that ends up being a much wider class of weapons. So, that is potentially a feature of the law that I think a lot of people think could have an effect on firearms violence. Are there any other gun policies that the data shows work? What are some other things that could be happening? And beyond mass shootings, beyond assault weapons, what are some of the things that would make a difference in the number of gun fatalities we have in the US? So, in the systematic review we maintain on the gun policy and America website, we have identified a few laws that we think have the strongest evidence of an effect. One of them is child access prevention laws. These are kind of safe storage law that say, you know, you got to keep your gun locked up if there's any chance of a kid getting him. There's lots of research now that suggests that these laws are associated with reductions in childhood fatalities, childhood suicide, childhood injuries, even homicides of children. This is one of the laws that seems to be effective. There are a couple laws that have this highest level of evidence that we rate that appear to actually do harm. And so, maybe getting rid of those would benefit states. One of them is standard ground. There's fairly consistent evidence that firearm homicides increase when standard ground statutes are passed. Another is shell issue laws. These are the concealed carry laws that the Bruin decision said every state now must have. And so, based on our research, we suspect that the states that had the more restrictive laws prior to Bruin are going to face higher firearm violence as a result of that decision unless they do something that counteracts the effects of that decision. In our evaluation of the effects of gun laws, we rank how much evidence there is for different possible effects of gun laws. The highest rating is supportive evidence. And then the second highest rating is moderate evidence. We think that there's moderate evidence that minimum age requirements for purchasing a firearm appear to decrease firearm suicides among young people. There's moderate evidence that domestic violence restraining orders that prohibit people who've been served those orders from having guns seem to reduce intimate partner homicides. There's moderate evidence that laws requiring prohibited possessors to surrender their firearms, reduce intimate partner homicides again. And there's moderate evidence that background checks on private sales of firearms can reduce total homicides and firearm homicides. Those are a few. I think I'll bore you if I keep going. One of the things that excites me about policy is the experimentation aspect of it. We have 50 states and a district of Columbia who can all try different things in these different ways. And it feels like we're not really throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. And I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's because we don't think of it as a public health emergency the way we think of smoking or the way we saw kind of how things happened very quickly when the coronavirus pandemic. And I just, I wonder why we're not just trying stuff while we're not just getting data and trying a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, it really is puzzling. And it's also puzzling because in surveys and polls, it appears that there is an appetite in the public for trying more things, trying more laws, more regulations to reduce firearms violence. Some policies like background checks on private sales poll incredibly well, even with gun owners. 80% or more of Americans think that's a good idea. So why don't we have those laws everywhere? We have them in a few states, but they haven't passed any federal bills that would do that, although there have been some proposed. I think it's a political mess right now. And I think that lawmakers are concerned about appearing to be weak on the Second Amendment. They're likely to be targeted by groups that are Second Amendment absolutists if they show any sign of interest in those kinds of popular regulations. So yeah, I think we're stuck that way. States are doing better. States, you know, there is more experimentation going on in the states. As I was saying before, I mean, there are states that are imposing more restrictive gun laws than states that are dropping them. And I think the states that are dropping them, a lot of people believe that dropping them will make people safer. And that's not what we've been finding in our own research. We find that more restrictive gun laws reduces gun violence and suicide. But I think that there's a belief among many people and many gun owners that having more guns in the community makes people safer. So I consider myself very much an optimist, which, you know, I feel like is becoming more and more rare these days. But I remember Columbine. That's the first mass shooting I remember. I was eight years old in elementary school. And then I remember Virginia Tech and I remember Sandy Hook and I remember the shooting at Mother Emanuel and how after that, you know, my church was like, all right, we're going to start having security at church every Sunday. And the day of the covenant shooting, I was off work and I was sitting in a coffee shop reading and I got the news alert and I just looked around and I realized, wow, there's only one entrance in this coffee shop. Someone could come in here and wreak havoc. And, you know, I think about it when I'm at the grocery store. I think about it when I'm at movie theaters. And it's sort of this one piece of policy that I think is the most difficult for me to be optimistic about that will be able to find this balance between, you know, protecting the second amendment rights. There are people who hunt and there are people that do it for sport. There are collectors and just finding this balance between having that right, which has been enshrined in our Constitution, which is not going anywhere. Because the constitutionality and, you know, public opinion, but also, you know, wanting to feel safe and not necessarily think, okay, where am I exits, what's happening, what's, what am I going to do in case this happens and is there anything at all right now that makes you hopeful about policy about, you know, America, we're going to get this together and we're going to figure this out. Is there anything that kind of gives you that sliver of hope? It's hard to find the hopeful angle here, but I can point to one thing. For 20 years or more, there was pretty limited amount of research going on about how to prevent gun violence. And that was after the Dickie Amendment, you know, the federal government really wasn't funding very much work in that area. And then starting at the end of the Obama administration and with some things that some philanthropies did, including starting the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, which was a private philanthropy that I direct that got $25 million to distribute for gun violence prevention research. And the federal government started funding it again in 2019, 2020, and has renewed that funding each year since then. As a result, we now have more research going on and important findings coming out pretty regularly than we've had in decades, probably forever. And I think that there's some optimism there. There is, you know, important work being done on, you know, the effects of violence and directors in city streets and how they are or are not helping reduce gun violence. There's been really good work on the risks of having a firearm in the home. There's good work being done on preventing police shootings. Research isn't the only way of getting there, but I think it's one of the optimistic developments of recent years that I think will probably help to reduce gun violence. Andrew Morale, thank you so much for joining us on the weeds. Thank you. I enjoyed it. That's all for us today. Thank you to Adam Winkler and Andrew Morale for joining me. Our producer is Sophie Lalonde, Christian Ayala engineered this episode. Caitlin Pinsey-Mug fact checked it, our editorial director is AM Hall, and I'm your host, John Klinehill. We want to hear from you. You're burning policy questions, your thoughts on the show. Send us an email weedsatvox.com The weeds is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.