Global Gun Violence Research Requires a Multidisciplinary Approach.
Global Gun Violence Research Requires a Multidisciplinary Approach
Research on firearm violence faces complex challenges that require collaborative efforts across continents to reduce the toll of this growing crisis.
Gun violence remains a global public health crisis, with up to 71 percent of homicides worldwide involving firearms.
Although gun culture and mass shootings are uniquely associated with the United States, firearm violence is a global public health crisis that inflicts physical, mental, and economic harm among affected individuals and communities. More than 70 percent of gun-involved homicides occur in low- and middle-income countries, with countries in Latin America and the Caribbean bearing the greatest burden.
Understanding gun violence risk factors, along with effective policies and interventions, can help reverse this alarming trend, but researchers face multiple challenges in achieving these goals, according to a new commentary published in The Lancet.
In the commentary, Adnan Hyder, School of Public Health dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, and authors Sandra Ley, Distinguished Professor in Political Science in the School of Social Science and Government at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City; Lorena Barberia, professor in the Department of Political Science, University of São Paulo; and Aisha Jafri, director of the Lancet Commission on Global Gun Violence and Health, identify the major challenges that gun violence researchers face.
One important issue that countries are grappling with is a lack of access and availability to quality data on firearm violence, the authors write. For example, Mexico considers many of its gun violence investigations and data to be issues of national security, so this information is often withheld—and the information that does become available to the public is often delayed or inconsistent.
Many governments have even passed legislation to withhold firearm violence data or terminate funding for gun violence research. These decisions are further complicated by geopolitical influences that result in inconsistent support of international gun research. “Strategic and economic interests take precedence over global health concerns, complicating efforts to fund research initiatives that maintain integrity and public trust,” the authors write, citing the 2025 firings of more than 200 staff members from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Injury Center.
Lastly, the authors argue that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) decision to change the way it addresses gun violence will affect the way firearm research is conducted. Since 2014, the WHO has moved away from producing reports that specifically focus on firearm policy and legislation, and instead folded its gun violence agenda into its broader work on homicides, which may diminish the targeted approaches needed to address the complexities of gun violence.
Overcoming these complex challenges to researching gun violence requires concerted and creative efforts—such as coordinated efforts between academia, investigative journalism, and civil society to capture gun violence information, the authors write.
“When collaborating across sectors and countries, institutions can unlock knowledge exchange and shared learning and broaden funding sources,” says Jafri. “A multifaceted gun violence consortium is well positioned to communicate the evidence to different stakeholders, inform policy development, and catalyze community engagement and mobilization.”In this aim, The Lancet established a Commission on Global Gun Violence and Health in 2024 to spur gun violence research and evidence-based action at the local, national, regional, and international levels. Co-led by Drs. Hyder and Barberia, the commission consists of international experts in public health, economics, law, medicine, history, political science, and more.
“Gun violence is a highly complex issue that calls for convergent thinking to explore multisectoral solutions, and we hope to deliver a pathway towards that in our report next year,” Hyder says. “It is already clear that new thinking is needed for the prevention, mitigation and control of gun violence here in the United States and in the top ten countries with the highest burden of this disease. We need a lot more research in low- and middle-income countries in the future, as the current quantum of work is very limited in those settings.”