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Annenberg's Daniel Romer proposes tobacco-control tactics to shrink the consumer appeal of handguns
APPC research director Daniel Romer argues in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that anti-smoking methods could cut the consumer appeal of handguns. He aims at demand across the whole population and says research still has to show whether the approach works.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Firearm-violence prevention has mostly worked with people judged at risk of harming themselves or others, and Romer offers his population-wide approach as a complement to that.
- In the Bruen case the Supreme Court called handguns the "quintessential self-defense weapon" and used that to justify Second Amendment protection for their use.
- Romer names film and TV portrayals, which often show guns as effective tools for subduing adversaries and protecting family, as one place to challenge that self-defense image.
- Earlier Annenberg research associated rising gun use in popular movies and TV crime dramas with more firearm homicides, especially among people aged 15 to 24.
- Measures he proposes studying include cutting firearm product placement in entertainment and public messaging on ownership risks and on guns left unsecured at home.
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Why it matters
- constraint A tobacco-style campaign against handguns would start from trend lines alone, because the causal studies that backed the cigarette effort have not yet been done for guns on screen.
- exposure Paid firearm placements in film and television become a candidate policy target, the same measure the tobacco campaign used when paid cigarette placement ended.
- decision Prevention funders get a population-wide option to weigh alongside high-risk programs, and its success would have to be judged on population figures such as handgun purchases and homicides.
The anti-smoking campaign Romer borrows from paired education about smoking's health effects with limits on how cigarettes were promoted and portrayed. That included ending paid tobacco product placement in entertainment [7]. Smoking in popular movies declined along with population smoking rates [8].
The firearm evidence so far is two trend lines that move together. Gun use in popular movies rose from 2000 to 2021, and over those 21 years it closely tracked handgun purchases [10][13]. The write-up does not give effect sizes for that link or for the homicide association. Two series that climb together for two decades would also do so if something else were pushing both up. The source says as much: more research is needed to determine the causal impact of seeing firearms in movies [11].
Romer's case for why portrayals matter is about what viewers learn from them. "Those shows make it seem that it is easy to hit their targets with effects that appear bloodless," he wrote. "A young person viewing these portrayals could easily get the impression that handguns are a simple and effective way to protect oneself." [6] Personal protection is the reason owners cite most often for having a firearm [3].
On education, he points to the cigarette record. "The public health approach to cigarettes as a consumer product demonstrated how various forms of public education can debunk the claim that owning a firearm is worth the risks that accompany widespread possession," Romer said [15]. He added that further research is needed to determine whether such strategies would be effective, "but the success of the universal public health approach to cigarettes serves as a model for the reduction of the consumer appeal of firearms." [12]
The paper is an argument. The data it leans on come from earlier work by the policy center's Annenberg Health and Risk Communication Institute [9]. That matters for how much weight it can bear. A proposal built on associations is a set of hypotheses, and this one is clear enough to be tested.
I think it holds up as a research agenda, and only as that for now. Each measure on Romer's list can be tried and then checked against the handgun purchase and homicide figures his center has already used [14][9][10]. For cigarettes, researchers went on to establish the causal effect of on-screen exposure. For guns on screen, that study is still to be done [11].
What to watch
- Causal studies of on-screen firearm exposure like the ones run for adolescents seeing movie smoking, which the source says are still needed.
- Any reduction in paid firearm product placement by studios, since that change could be checked against handgun purchase data.
- Trials of public messaging on firearm-ownership risks and unsecured home storage, measured on population outcomes.