As of right now, in the entire United States, there is just a single federally funded study on preventing gun violence in America’s schools. It started in September.
And in the days since 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in their classroom at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, members of the research team of about a dozen scientists and educators have been furiously emailing back and forth, asking how they can speed up the work on their three-year grant.
"We really don’t know what works and what doesn’t to keep schools safe from events like Tuesday,” said Charles Branas, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and one of the lead investigators in the study. School districts across the country are formulating policies in a vacuum without "any evidence to hang their hat on.”