A GW professor will co-chair a global commission examining gun violence as a global public health issue to influence global policy after launching the study earlier this month.
Adnan Hyder, a professor of global health at Milken Institute School of Public Health, will serve as the co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Global Gun Violence and Health, along with Lorena Barberia, a professor of political science at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. Hyder said the commission aims to gather the perspectives of experts across the globe to examine gun violence from a “public health framework” by focusing on the mental and physical health impacts of gun violence.
Hyder said the commission’s public health and policy experts from around the world will conduct a review of published papers and databases to compile research on the causes and possible solutions of gun violence and publish a report in the Lancet, a British medical journal, with their findings and policy recommendations in 2026. He said the commission plans to meet in early 2025 to discuss a plan for compiling research.
“We are launching this Lancet commission, one, because it’s a pressing issue in multiple countries around the world, not just this country,” Hyder said. “Number two, it has not been given the appropriate attention as a global public health problem that it deserves.”
Hyder said gun violence often affects people’s health by leaving them with injuries or causing fatalities, but people tend not to think of gun violence as a global health emergency, which people typically associate with contagious diseases. He said examining case studies of gun violence from around the world will give researchers an idea of how to prevent injuries from gun violence by learning about approaches in certain countries like stricter gun laws and applying it elsewhere.
“Is the United Kingdom doing something that may be helpful to the United States?” Hyder said. “Is South Africa doing something that might be helpful to India? So what are the cross border lessons?”
Hyder said there is a misconception that gun violence only affects a few countries, but it is a problem all around the world and is not a geographically isolated phenomenon.
“We have to confront this issue because thousands of people are dying every day, and it’s happening every day, and we seem to be accepting it,” Hyder said.
Hyder said his goal for the commission is to raise awareness of gun violence as a public health issue on par with the AIDS epidemic or malaria and prompt policymakers to treat it as such and implement policies that are backed by global evidence. Hyder said there is evidence that stricter gun law passed in other countries have been effective in reducing gun violence, and he hopes policy leaders across the globe utilize this information to inform their own approaches to gun control.
“We hope that ministers of health, secretaries of health, secretaries of labor and justice, will look upon this as the best evidence to inform their policy development,” Hyder said. “So when people are thinking about and hopefully in this country, for example, when we think about sensible gun policies, we choose the ones that have evidence.”
Experts who study gun violence said the global nature of the commission will help individual nations learn from the solutions other countries are implementing like regulations on gun ownership.
Caterina Roman, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said the international structure of the commission will inform individual scholars on solutions to gun violence that they may not have considered due to their culture. She said in the United States it is often assumed the best deterrent of crimes like gun violence is mass incarceration, but in other countries law enforcement is more focused on rehabilitating offenders.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with more than 4.9 million Americans being jailed annually and the government spending $80 billion dollars each year on incarceration.
“We don’t even know what our biases are if we’re not exposed to people who have different cultures and experiences with things,” Roman said. “So for instance, in the U.S., like I was saying earlier, the typical response to crime has been punishment and incarceration. You certainly can be learning from the nations that don’t rely on incarceration or even lengthy sentences.”
Roman said one of the obstacles to combating gun violence is the lack of consensus among experts and lawmakers on what causes gun violence and what policies would work to solve it. She said without consensus, no effective policy can be passed.
“No one can say one thing causes gun violence and there are no easy solutions,” Roman said. “So we unfortunately have a partisan, we have a divided response, so nothing gets done in prevention.”
Benjamin Dowd-Arrow, an assistant professor of social sciences and public policy at Florida State University, said the United States has more gun violence than most developed nations, so researchers here can benefit from hearing the perspectives of other countries through the commission.
“I think having these other perspectives allows us to look at what worked, especially when we look at comparable nations,” Dowd-Arrow said. “Nations that have a similar history of colonialism, like the United States. So if we look at Brazil, or we look at Australia, we can see they have very similar histories of how their peoples were moved there.”
