One inspiring example comes from Cali, Colombia, and highlights the value of using data to identify risk factors for homicide. In the early 1990s, the mayor of Cali decided to use data to improve health outcomes in his city. A physician and epidemiologist by training, Dr. Rodrigo Guerrero Velasco set up a firearm death tracking system to identify different risk factors driving these trends. Guerrero Velasco and his colleagues found that more than half of Cali’s homicide victims were intoxicated. Also, analysis of the data revealed that homicides were more likely to involve young people and occur on holiday weekends, weekends following paydays, and election days.
Based on these findings, Guerrero Velasco implemented several interventions to address these risk factors, such as limiting the hours alcohol could be sold, imposing curfews for individuals under 18 on the weekends, and imposing short-term gun bans on select weekends and election days when homicides were most likely to occur. According to an academic study based on an analysis of the city’s gun death database, homicides declined from a high of 124 per 100,000 in 1994 to 86 per 100,000 in 1997. Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and co-authored by University of Washington epidemiologists found that homicide death rates were 14 percent lower than expected during periods when gun bans were imposed in Cali.
Homicide rates in Cali, Colombia, 1983-1998
HomicidesCaliNote: Figure taken from paper entitled “La epidemiología de los homicidios en Cali, 1993-1998: seis años de un modelo poblacional” published in the Pan American Journal of Public Health
In 2011, Guerrero Velasco was re-elected to a second term as mayor of Cali. In a Sept. 15, 2015, article for Scientific American, Guerrero Velasco wrote that renewed efforts stemmed gun violence. “Cali’s homicide rate of 83 in 2012 dropped to 62 in 2014. This pattern has continued; the number of homicides in the first trimester of 2015 is less than in the same period in any of the past 12 years.”
Instead of using local data to identify local solutions, the U.S. may largely have to rely on studies done in other countries to gain insight into ways to curb gun violence. Even though Obama lifted a 17-year-old ban on U.S. federal funding for gun violence research in 2013, a congressional ban on funding for this research remains in place, with Congress renewing the ban after nine people were killed in a Charleston, S.C., church.
As a society, we must take serious actions now to curb the threat of firearm-related deaths. Let’s look to other countries for inspiration for what works.
