Three Penn faculty members joined a group of scholars in authoring a report about the challenges and solutions to gun violence for the Journal of the American Medical Association Summit.
The JAMA Summit on Firearm Violence convened leaders in March to chart a path toward reduced firearm violence. The JAMA Summit report — which featured three Penn professors and was published on Nov. 3 — summarized the group's calls for coordinated community investment, smarter technology, and policy reforms to treat gun violence as a preventable public health crisis rather than an inevitable reality.
“Firearm injury is a profound and preventable public health crisis that demands more than singular solutions,” professor of Nursing and co-author Therese Richmond wrote in a Penn Nursing announcement.
Criminology professor Anthony Braga and School of Social Policy & Practice and Annenberg School for Communication professor Desmond Patton joined Richmond in creating the report.
They defined firearm violence within “larger societal and historical contexts.”
“Since the start of the 21st century, more than 800 000 firearm deaths and more than 2 million firearm injuries have occurred in the US,” the report read. “Nearly 80% of homicides and 55% of suicide deaths involve firearms ... suicide death rates increased steadily throughout the 21st century, reaching an all-time high (7.63 per 100 000) in 2023, with large increases among adolescents and non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic persons.”
To address these issues, the authors emphasized the solutions that the summit attendees discussed, including “upstream prevention.”
“The promise of primordial prevention lies in its power to shift the very conditions under which violence becomes possible and simultaneously improves health and safety,” the report read. “By restoring trust, redistributing power, and redesigning context, these innovations can help build a future where firearm injury is not just treated, but prevented.”
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The authors included examples of housing, health care, and public funding policies. They also mentioned the possibilities that technological advancement presents.
“Encouraging innovations such as multibiometric personally authorized firearms and robotics, passive detection systems, and AI for upstream prevention hold promise but will require technological literacy and rigorous evaluation,” the authors wrote. “It will be essential to work toward a consumer product approach for firearms to strengthen safety in homes and communities.”
Creating a “safer world” would “require investing in the discovery, implementation, and scaling of solutions that reduce firearm harms and center on the people and communities most affected by firearm violence,” the report concluded.
