Yale Emergency Medicine’s Drs. Lori Post and Liudvikas Jagminas, and Emergency Medical Service's Dr. David Cone have teamed up with Dr. Daniel Mabrey, Assistant Dean at the University of New Haven's Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences and his team to create the first statewide firearm violence, death, and injury surveillance system.
After a 15 year lull in firearms research, the National Institute of Justice has announced the first funding opportunity since 1997. According to Dr. Post, this is the opportunity to better understand firearms violence, injury, and death that researchers have been waiting for.
The issue of the prevalence of firearms violence, death, and injury is something that must be investigated, but that has not been thoroughly addressed, Post says. She also emphasized the necessity of identifying and correcting error rates in current estimates, something that can only be done with a concerted research effort.
“We don’t know how big the problem is because we haven’t studied it,” she said.
Though there is a wealth of this kind of data in the state of Connecticut, there are significant gaps in current data registries. Emergency Department records and EMS data for instance, are often not reported to police or state agencies, and therefore cannot be used to create an accurate picture of the firearms-related incidents in a given area.
This incomplete picture of firearms violence can be rectified by a rigorous surveillance system, according to Post. Along with the data from Emergency Departments; Medical Examiner, trauma registry, police report, and Emergency Medical Services data will be analyzed by the team in order to create an inclusive picture of every firearms-related event.
To do this, Post has joined a project headed by Dr. Daniel Mabrey, UNH criminal justice expert and Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups (ISVG), a group that specializes in analyzing, tracking, and linking violence and extremism data.
Mabrey and the teams at UNH and ISVG draw from their criminal justice expertise and experience collecting violence data and the Yale collaborators will bring the medical data, according to Post. Ideally, the project will result in decision support for policy makers.
“We are here to collect evidence to help policy makers make informed decisions.” Post said.
The proposed research has already garnered the attention of some policy makers. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro has spoken out in support of firearms-related violence research along with Ted Alcorn, Research Director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns and senior policy analyst for New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg.
Press:
New Haven Register article
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s press release