A gun violence ‘action plan’ calls for a new emphasis on prevention : Shots

Community members gathered in Minneapolis for a candlelight vigil honoring the victims and survivors of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday, August 27, 2025.

Jeff Wheeler/Star Tribune/Getty Images

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Jeff Wheeler/Star Tribune/Getty Images

Over the past 25 years, the United States has seen more than 800,000 deaths from gun violence and at least 2 million injuries. A new report offers a roadmap to reduce the human toll of this crisis by 2040.

Sixty leading experts from diverse fields, including medicine, public health, criminology, law and the technology sector, came together earlier this year to create an action plan to address the problem. The report was published in JAMA Monday.

“For too long, I think we’ve treated this as inevitable,” says study co-author Dr. Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon and executive vice president of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, although the vast majority of gun deaths occur among adults. And nearly 60% of all deaths from firearm injuries are suicides.

“We have a body of scientific data that can illuminate and reduce the burden of injuries caused by gun violence,” says Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the school of public health at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the study.

“For example, through laws that ensure there is appropriate control and that guns do not fall into the hands of people with a history of violence.”

The authors support alternative solutions to the typical approach to combating gun violence, which has been adopted by the criminal justice system.

“We’re not saying we don’t need any arrests or any incarceration,” says Daniel Webster, study co-author and professor at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s still necessary for public safety reasons. But you need to invest in programs that prevent violence.”

The roadmap outlined by the study includes adopting a community-wide prevention approach by addressing socio-economic inequalities.

“Gun damage is a symptom of deeper structural issues when you think about poverty, segregation, trauma and lack of opportunity,” says Sakran, who is himself a survivor of gun violence. At the age of 17, he was seriously injured in a shooting after a high school football game.

Studies show that addressing these “upstream” factors can prevent gun violence, Sakran says.

“Things like housing stability, a strong education system, pathways to employment, access to health care, that are as essential to violence prevention as perhaps any other law enforcement strategy,” he adds.

One such intervention against community violence in Chicago, called Create Real Economic Destiny, uses community organizations to identify individuals most at risk of being involved in violent crime and recruit them to receive supports such as mental health care, mentoring, education and job training.

A 2023 study found that alumni of this program were 73% less likely to be involved in a violent crime in the following two years.

Webster and his colleagues found that a similar program in Baltimore, called Safe Streets, led to a 32 percent reduction in homicides and a 23 percent reduction in nonfatal shootings.

State gun laws also make a difference, Webster says. For example, a recent study in JAMA Pediatrics showed that states with more restrictive gun laws have fewer child deaths from guns.

Webster and colleagues have shown that gun licensing laws “can reduce gun homicides by about 30 percent or more.” “And similar effects on reducing gun suicide,” he says.

Overall, the report calls for a multi-pronged approach to prevention.

“In America, the burden [of addressing gun violence] has often been placed on the shoulders of a few people,” says Sakran. “What this report is about is the collective action that is so essential to getting things done. »