Experts with the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium (RGVRC) address different facets of firearm violence from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. In this new series, get to know our experts and learn more about their contributions to better understand, prevent, and respond to the public health crisis of firearm violence. Meet Kerri Raissian, a scholar with the RGVRC and a senior research scientist in the School of Public Health at Yale University.

Why do you study gun violence? Why is this an important area of research, and how do you see your work helping to address this issue?

I actually say that I study firearm injury prevention, and this is because I am interested in reducing how all forms of harm from firearms can be prevented and therefore reduced. To me, this includes homicides, assaults, suicides, unintentional firearm discharge, and law enforcement-involved shootings, as well as the harm done to communities and people following an episode of firearm injury. But I also think it’s really important for our policies to protect the rights of citizens who own guns. As a lifelong student of public policy, I hope my work can balance these two things.

I come to this work from multiple paths. I grew up in Texas and was often on my family’s very rural farm. To this end, I grew up around guns, and I am generally comfortable around them. Though I wouldn’t describe myself as a firearm enthusiast, I know (and love) people who are.

Fast forward to my sophomore year in high school, which was in Arkansas. It was the eve of deer hunting season. I was at a friend’s house after a football game (and to be clear, all parents were home, it was a very tame gathering). The shining star of our class, April, was in the backroom with her boyfriend. She’d also been on the phone with her grandmother, arranging pickup times. In an absolute blur, the next thing I saw was April running out. She’d been shot in the neck, and her boyfriend (and yes, he’d shot her) was screaming for help. April left via ambulance. I yelled that I loved her. But she died one month shy of her 16th birthday.

Fast forward again to my college years. I started to formally learn about issues like intimate partner and domestic violence, and in particular, our nation’s legal responses to those forms of violence. After college, I started work in the Davidson County (Nashville, TN) District Attorney’s Office, where I was a victim witness coordinator for domestic violence victims. In college, they told me the presence of a firearm increased a victim’s risk of lethality. But sitting with victims of domestic violence every day, I felt it in a much more human way.

Fast forward to grad school. I decided to write my dissertation on the causal effect of the Gun Control Act’s 1996 expansion, which prohibits domestic violence misdemeanants from owning guns, on domestic violence homicide (I find it reduces firearm homicide with no increase in non-firearm homicides). While I was writing, the tragedy at Sandy Hook happened. I couldn’t concentrate. I was so affected (like so many) by this horrific murder of children, school professionals, and even the shooter’s mother. This school shooting also had deep roots in family violence, and I couldn’t look away. I also wept for those families.

Fast forward… one more time. I am a survivor of family violence, too. And in recent years, the activity with my own abuser has ramped up. I’ve carried a firearm in the event I needed it. So when I say that we have to balance the rights of firearm owners with strategies to reduce firearm violence, I mean that deeply. In my work, I strive to work in partnership with communities and practitioners, those who live with and understand the nuance and complications of this issue, to bring about strategies that work for ALL people.

What is your research focus related to gun violence? What are you currently researching?

There are so many exciting things to talk about, but I will focus on three areas.

I provide leadership direction to the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH). In that role, I provide support to the many projects that are ongoing among this fantastic group of scholars. A feature of these projects is that we center survivors in our work, and we do this because we fundamentally believe that survivors have important expertise that must be fully incorporated into research.

We center survivors in a number of ways, but our Community Scholar, Nelba Marquez-Greene [a parent who lost her child in the Sandy Hook shooting], guides us in each project to ensure this critical component is an integral part of all that we do. Each project is developed in partnership with our community collaborators, and it’s exciting to be a part of those projects—even if only in a supportive way. It’s an honor to see science and society linked in all that we do.

As for my personal research portfolio, I am focusing on two things right now: piloting and evaluating domestic violence prosecution strategies and working to understand how incentives (primarily through insurance) can increase secure firearm storage.

About 20 years ago, Chicago/Cook County piloted a program called “Target Abuser Call” (TAC) among their high lethality domestic violence cases. TAC showed great success: increased victim participation, more convictions, and reduced victim homicide (especially firearm-based homicide). I am now working with 5 prosecutors’ offices around the country (with funding from Arnold Ventures) to understand if TAC replicates in other contexts, communities, and among different victims/ survivors. If it does, this could provide critical information to prosecutors’ offices about one evidence-based way to manage scarce resources in pursuit of both victim and public safety. Given my prior work, it is a joy and an honor to work with these prosecutors. I’ll keep you posted!

The other part of my work is dedicated to understanding if and how incentives (rather than government mandates) can increase secure firearm storage behaviors. While there’s a good amount of evidence that secure storage laws, specifically child access prevention (CAP) laws, reduce firearm-related harms, these policies are unlikely to be adopted by some states. Further, even in states that have adopted them, we know there are unsecured firearms, and so we need to work on strategies to increase secured storage in states with policies, too.

I, along with my colleague (Jennifer Necci Dineen), have been keenly interested in the possibility of insurance serving as a mechanism to increase secure storage through information, incentives, and, in some cases, policy requirements. We have a forthcoming white paper on the topic, and I look forward to sharing it widely. If there are insurance professionals out there looking to partner, please be in touch! We have ideas!

What do you hope that people can take away from the research you are conducting?

The work of firearm injury prevention can feel really overwhelming, not just at times—perhaps all the time. I think I’ve had an impact in a few spaces because my work was done with the community. I define community broadly, and the term will be project-specific, but at its heart, it’s about knowing how a given research topic or project fits among the people it should serve (and I do believe research should “serve” not just “answer”).

I think in order to do that, we have to listen with humility, be open to new ideas, and find areas of agreement. But when we find disagreement, don’t stop the conversation. We have to talk about that, too. We have to understand perspectives that are different from ours because our policies and prevention strategies must take those into account, or they will be ineffective. Disagreement can also help identify unintended consequences of policies, and we must address those head-on.

Maybe I’d also like people to take a little hope. I talk to a lot of policymakers, communities, practitioners, firearm owners, and non-firearm owners, and they really do ALL want less firearm injury and related harms. When researchers work together with all of these stakeholders, we can help find evidence-based ways to achieve this common goal.