After 25 Years In The Dark, The CDC Wants To Study The True Toll Of Guns In America

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

In the U.S., mass shootings make news headlines. Gun violence and murders are up in many cities. But this is only part of the story of firearms in America. We know that about 100 people on average are killed by firearms in the U.S. every day - that includes criminal activity, suicides and accidents. We don't know the numbers or have many details about nonfatal firearm injuries or the physical, mental and economic wounds they leave. That's finally changing, as NPR's Eric Westervelt reports.

ERIC WESTERVELT, BYLINE: In 2004, Jennifer Longdon and her fiance had just returned from vacation. They were about to get dinner in a Phoenix, Ariz., drive-through when someone pulled alongside them and opened fire. Five bullets later, both were near death. Longdon's fiance was shot three times.

JENNIFER LONGDON: He was shot in the head, and he's now blind. He has no sense of smell. His hearing is diminished and has a very significant brain injury that impacts how he thinks.

WESTERVELT: There was no why, however ludicrous, no road rage or drug deal gone bad. The shooting was totally random and inexplicable - America's other epidemic. The couple was grabbing some tacos, holding hands and talking wedding details. There would be no wedding. The former fiance is now medically incapacitated.

The couple didn't stay together. Their lives were soon consumed by surgeries and outpatient therapy and adjusting to life with a disability. The last bullet fired from the pickup truck struck Longdon's in her back. She's now paralyzed just below her collarbone. She uses a wheelchair. Longdon's still chokes up remembering the night of the shooting when her ex-husband brought their then-12-year-old son bedside in the hospital trauma room.

LONGDON: And there's my little boy. I'm sorry. And he's trying to comfort me. And he's stroking my hair that's just full of blood, telling me it's going to be OK. And the thing that I always remember is that he was so afraid and so brave and that that happens to children across our country every single day.

WESTERVELT: But how often every single day is someone injured by a firearm in America? And why and how did it happen? What kind of weapon was used? What are the causes, the relationship between the shooter and victim? What works best to prevent shootings and accidents? What programs are scalable?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn't have good answers - even the basics. The agency thinks there are about 370 nonfatal gun injuries every day. That includes criminal violence, suicide attempts and accidents. But a CDC spokeswoman tells NPR, quote, "national estimates for nonfatal firearm-related injuries from 2016 through 2019 have been suppressed due to unstable estimates."

MARK ROSENBERG: We don't know. That's an astounding answer. It should be shocking to people.

WESTERVELT: That's Dr. Mark Rosenberg. He was founding director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. In 1999, the gun lobby got Rosenberg fired from that leadership position for, well, doing his job - advocating a science-based approach to gun violence prevention research. In the following two decades, the NRA and Republican allies helped stifle almost all federal action on that research through what's known as the Dickey Amendment, named for Arkansas Republican Congressman Jay Dickey, who led the effort. The CDC was barred from spending any money to, quote, "advocate or promote gun control."

That language had more than a chilling effect. It basically froze the collection and sharing of even basic data across the fields of health care, criminal justice and academia. That left doctors, policymakers and others largely on their own and in the dark. For years, the NRA successfully argued that studying and analyzing gun violence prevention would undermine gun owners' rights.

ROSENBERG: It was an early version of a very big lie. It was a disastrous strategy for the country, but a very effective strategy for the NRA.

WESTERVELT: But in a remarkable twist, Dr. Rosenberg got to know the man who got him fired from the CDC - Republican Jay Dickey. These once mortal political enemies started talking and listening.

ROSENBERG: We did start speaking. We started to understand each other.

WESTERVELT: And they became not just friendly, but good friends. Dr. Rosenberg even gave the eulogy at Congressman Dickey's funeral in 2017. Before Dickey passed away, he said he came to regret his role in effectively barring the CDC from researching gun violence. He and Dr. Rosenberg worked together to try to restore federal funding and promote a public health approach to gun safety.

ROSENBERG: Jay learned from me that the public health approach was not a threat to gun ownership, but had the potential to save lives. And I learned from Jay that we had to say at the outset that we are going to find ways to both prevent gun violence and protect gun rights.

WESTERVELT: In 2019, Rosenberg and Dickey's former wife, Betty, were a key part of a broader coalition that helped persuade Congress to appropriate funds for gun violence research after 20 years in the wilderness. It's a tiny amount of money by federal funding standards - initially just 25 million split between the CDC and the NIH. But after years of near silence by the nation's top public health agency, the fact that the current CDC director is now speaking out on the need for gun violence prevention research and funding marks a turning point. Here's Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recently on CNN, making the case for better gun violence data collection sharing and analysis.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ROCHELLE WALENSKY: My job is to understand and evaluate the problem, to understand the scope of the problem, to understand why this happens and what are the things that can make it better - to research that, to scale that up, to evaluate it and to make sure that we can integrate it into communities. We have a lot of work to do in every single one of those areas because we haven't done a lot of work as a nation in almost any of them.

WESTERVELT: Among several other gun research projects, the CDC is now funding 10 state health departments to start collecting near real-time data on nonfatal firearm injuries. That will allow doctors and epidemiologists to potentially identify trends and hotspots and take action like they do against the coronavirus pandemic. And that's exactly the kind of information researchers say is vitally needed and long overdue.

As for Jennifer Longdon, the Arizona mom paralyzed in the taco drive-through shooting, she was elected to the Arizona State House of Representatives in 2018. She welcomes the renewal of federal research, but hopes to see it grow far beyond the initial funding.

LONGDON: Nonfatal injuries do not get the attention that they deserve, and the best policy comes from having great data. And so that's the first thing that we need to fix.

WESTERVELT: Longdon today is the assistant Democratic leader in the Arizona House. Among her top priorities - disability rights and public health-based gun violence prevention.

Eric Westervelt, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.