I enjoy the sport of shooting, although I rarely shoot anymore. However, as a clinician, as someone who is committed to emergency medicine, it is equally evident to me that firearm violence is wreaking havoc on public health. With his latest project, Kellermann hopes to alter that trend by moving from merely pointing out problems related to gun violence to actually effecting a solution. It's time to move on, to try various approaches to preventing firearm violence. Some will work and some won't.
Evaluation research is needed to tell the difference.
But program evaluation is often regarded with great distrust by those who consider it an arbitrary and often unfair judge that simply says, Thumbs up or thumbs down, the program worked, the program failed. We now know, particularly in issues as complex and challenging as violence, that evaluation has to be a fluid and evolving process. It should provide a feedback loop that permits a program to evolve and be refined over time. The grant was the first of its kind awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice to public health researchers. And out of that process youth and deadly weapons emerged as a key priority for every single one of those groups. . . .