California attorney general cuts off researchers’ access to gun violence data

For decades, America’s gun violence researchers fought an uphill battle against the National Rifle Association to obtain the data and funding they need to study the effects of US gun laws. But researchers in California say they are now facing a different, unexpected hurdle: the state’s outgoing Democratic attorney general.

Under Xavier Becerra, who has been nominated to serve as Joe Biden’s health secretary, California’s department of justice started to deny researchers access to firearms data used to evaluate a wide range of gun laws and policies.

The new data restrictions have put key projects at California’s state-funded gun violence research center in limbo, and locked Becerra into a bitter, bizarre public standoff with one of America’s most respected gun violence researchers.

California, which has much stricter gun laws than most American states, also has more detailed government data available, including records of individual handgun purchasers going back decades and statewide records about the restraining orders filed to temporarily bar at-risk people from owning or buying guns.

This more detailed personal information has allowed California researchers to conduct rigorous analyses of the state’s gun laws and policies, looking at early evidence of whether the state’s new gun violence restraining orders have helped to prevent mass shootings, studying whether buying a handgun puts a person at higher risk of dying from gun suicide, and examining whether expanding the category of people with violent records who are barred from buying guns might reduce gun violence.

But it’s precisely this more detailed personal information, including about gun purchasers, and subjects of gun violence restraining orders, that Becerra’s justice department is telling some researchers that it will not provide. The department is also attempting to formalize some of these policies, including in a proposed rulemaking under discussion this week that would limit researcher’s access to personal information about the subjects of gun violence restraining orders across the state.

The justice department has cited privacy concerns as a justification for the data restrictions, and has said it believes current California law does not permit the agency to release certain kinds of data to researchers.

“The California department of justice values data-driven research and its role in pushing forward informed public policy to help combat problems like gun violence,” it said in a statement. “We also take seriously our duty to protect Californians’ sensitive personally identifying information, and must follow the letter of the law regarding disclosures of the personal information in the data we collect and maintain.”

But Garen Wintemute, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and the director of California’s firearms violence research center, said some of the data the justice department is now denying researchers had been previously shared with them for decades, and other data is specifically mandated to be shared with the gun violence research center under California law.

“People have started to wonder what other reasons there might be for which privacy is a fig leaf,” Wintemute said.

When California in 2016 created the firearms violence research center, America’s first state funded institution researching the topic,Wintemute was named its director, and the California legislature specified that the justice department and other state agencies would provide the center with the data it needed to study risk factors for firearms violence and the effectiveness of different prevention strategies.

Wintemute said the center’s problems with accessing firearms data access started in 2017, when Becerra became California’s attorney general, and escalated in early 2020. “They’re refusing to provide any detailed explanation. They’re simply saying: you can’t have the data,” Wintemute said of the department’s decisions. “One of the mysteries is why this is happening: the law has not changed.”

During a meeting with the justice department’s research head and two staff attorneys last March, Wintemute said, he was told that “these decisions were being made by ‘exec’”, which he interpreted as meaning Becerra and his deputy, Sean McCluskie, who was recently appointed the chief of staff for the federal department of Health and Human Services.

“I think there is real grounds for concern that this sort of unethical approach to science is about to move to the head of health and human services, which is home to the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some of the leading research institutes in the world,” said Wintemute.

In statements justifying the department’s current policy, Becerra’s office repeatedly cited a piece of new legislation drafted by Wintemute himself, which would mandate the department of justice provide data to researchers as evidence that the current law was ambiguous and needed to be clarified.

Thedepartment of justice also pointed at Becerra’s broader record on gun violence as attorney general, including his legal defense of California’s attempt to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, which is still being litigated, and his involvement in multiple lawsuits pushing for tougher regulation of “ghost guns”.

McCluskie and the health and human services department did not respond to requests for comment.

Sarah Lovenheim, a former Becerra adviser, said in an emailed statement that “AG Becerra has a strong track record on gun violence prevention and merely acted in keeping with state law.”

The standoff in California is worrying for public health experts nationwide, since previous data access in California has made kinds of studies possible that have not been conducted in other states.

“I consider it a pretty serious challenge to gun violence research,” Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said.

While some Republicans and gun rights activists have pushed back against public health research on guns for decades, “I can’t think of an example” of another Democratic politician serving as a barrier to this kind of work, Webster said.

In an editorial Tuesday, the Sacramento Bee, which first reported the news of the data dispute, blasted Becerra for “hiding gun violence data,” and accused him of “obstructing”, rather than upholding, state law.

And three national organizations – Brady United Against Gun ViolenceGiffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence – have prepared comment opposing the new rules, with two of the groups arguing that they would “obstruct the mission of policymakers in both California and other states hoping to save lives by passing the most effective laws.”

Some California pro-gun activists, on the other hand, have wondered whether Becerra’s policy was motivated by a desire to “hide data” that might show the policies he supported were ineffective.

“Becerra’s repeated unwillingness to share various types of information suggests he’s more concerned about politics than truth. Is this latest cover-up an effort to hide data that reflects poorly on the effectiveness of his policies?”, Chuck Michel, the president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association, said in a statement.

Even California lawyers are confused. John Hemmerling, an assistant city attorney in San Diego, said that the state department of justice’s claims that the existing laws for dating sharing needed to be clarified did not make sense to him.

“I just can’t figure out why they want to limit some of the data that’s being released to a researcher like the University of California,” he said.

Wintemute, who was one of the public health experts whose federal research funding to study firearms issues was cut off after pressure from the National Rifle Association in the early 1990s, said the standoff felt strangely familiar.

The behavior of California’s justice department is “similar to what happened in the 1990s”, Wintemute said, when Republicans responded to a taxpayer-funded study finding that gun ownership was linked to an increased risk of homicide in the home by making symbolic cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget and warning that federal public health funding could not be used to “advocate or promote gun control”.

“Whatever the intent might be,” he said, “the effect is to choke off research on an important problem.”