Fund for a Safer Future funds a portfolio of research projects seeking to answer the question: What works to prevent gun violence?
Philanthropic support for research is critical because of limits on federal funding for gun violence prevention research. FSF-funded research projects have demonstrated the effectiveness of state firearm removal policies; quantified the relationship between substance abuse and firearm violence; and developed new and important insights about the characteristics of illegal gun markets.
Goals
- Demonstrate the effectiveness of gun violence prevention policies.
- Quantify the risk and protective factors for firearm violence.
- Provide insights about the characteristics of gun-related injuries and deaths.
To construct a conceptual model of violence reduction through specific activities delivered by the Cure Violence (CV) program, starting with violence interruption.
To assess the effectiveness of a hospital-based violence intervention program against violence-related reinjury and violence perpetration in Boston, Massachusetts.
To understand Black youth, caregiver, and provider perspectives on emergency department (ED)-based lethal means restriction (LMR) for patients at risk for suicide.
To identify all legal intervention homicides (LIHs) in the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) in 2019 through 2021 and code relevant circumstances based on manually reviewing the NVDRS incident narratives.
To assess and test the impact of gun violence prevention navigators in two practice settings (a hospital and a community crisis response center) in Baltimore, Maryland.
To develop a survey that will advance the field’s understanding of many aspects of firearm ownership and use among diverse racial and ethnic communities. It will also provide the first rigorous in-depth assessment of who divests from gun ownership and why
To improve gun violence prevention and research by expanding understanding and support for America’s foremost non-law enforcement policy solution to gun violence: community violence interventionists.
To systematically explore the informal and formal assessment and engagement strategies that Cure Violence workers utilize when making decisions about who to engage and how.
To understand effects of trauma exposure and postraumatic stress symptoms on decision-making for firearm behavior among Black male adolescents
To quantify the effectiveness of Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) at reducing household-level rates of interpersonal firearm violence, to compare the effectiveness of ERPOs at preventing suicide with involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations, and to assess police officers’ awareness of, attitudes toward, and willingness to use ERPOs.
To better understand and operationalize law enforcement officers training for carrying out ERPOs.
To develop a spatio-temporal modeling approach that incorporates social vulnerability scores to evaluate the impact of greening projects on crime reduction.
To develop community-informed violence prevention and intervention strategies that use ethical online engagement to prevent violence, resolve conflict, and promote safety and healing.
To examine the risk of subsequent firearm and non-firearm violence perpetration among individuals with a former felony or domestic violence misdemeanor conviction who had their firearm rights restored.
To examine the motivations and barriers to LOV participation among all eligible survivors of gun violence in St. Louis.
To assess how high-risk individuals respond to and are impacted by focused deterrence tools and messages, as well as the social services and assistance to which they are referred.