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For the past 20 years, Stephen Teret, JD, MPH '79, former director and current professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, has been telling anyone who would listen that many lives could be saved by requiring safer gun design. His vision of "personalized" guns that could not be fired by children or anyone other than authorized users helped spur life-saving technological innovations and recent policy changes.

On December 23, 2002, New Jersey became the first state to enact a law requiring all handguns to be designed with "personalized" gun technology. Gun violence prevention advocates in New Jersey credit the work of Professor Teret and the Center as the impetus for this landmark legislation. The Center also played a central role in advancing legislation that became effective in Maryland on January 1, 2003, requiring handguns to include "integrated mechanical safety" to prevent child and other unauthorized firearm access.

Since 1995, the work of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research has been bridging the gap between scientific research and gun violence prevention advocacy. The Center serves as an objective and credible resource for the media, policymakers, advocacy groups, attorneys, and academic researchers. With critical scientific and gun policy expertise, the Center promoted and evaluated an impressive number of national and local policy efforts.

The Center is currently led by co-directors Jon Vernick, JD, MPH '94, and Daniel Webster, ScD '91, MPH. It earned a national reputation as the premier academic center working to reframe the gun control debate in the United States as an issue of public health. The Center advocates for policy solutions to gun violence that incorporate a public health perspective and are informed by scientific research. The Center’’s priorities include the prevention of childhood gun violence, the regulation of guns as consumer products, and the prevention of illegal gun sales to youth and criminals. The Center also plans to embark on new projects focused on changing social norms related to firearm ownership, storage, carrying, and sales.

Gun violence remains one of the nation’’s most tenacious public health problems, causing almost 80 gun deaths a day in 2000. However, the work of the Center for Gun Policy and Research—and the entire gun violence prevention movement—currently faces sizeable economic obstacles. Much of the Center’’s funding has come from private foundations whose budgets have been curtailed by the downturn in the stock market.

Nonetheless, the Center's recent work has continued to have a widespread impact on local and national gun policy advancements. A study published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology by Dr. Webster, Professor Vernick, and Lisa Hepburn, PhD '01, found that in the years following the 1988 Maryland ban on "Saturday night special" handguns, 40 more lives were saved from gun homicide than could have been saved in the absence of the law.

Over the summer, the Center helped Baltimore City Health Commissioner Peter Beilenson, MD, MPH '90, plan an innovative intervention that shut down illegal ammunition dealers in Baltimore. The effort gained national media attention as an example of how local public health officers can use their legal authority to remove sources of illegal guns and ammunition from their communities.

During the chilling October Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks, the Center served as a daily resource to the national press. The Center also released a monograph entitled Comprehensive Ballistic Fingerprinting Policy of New Guns: A Tool for Solving and Preventing Violent Crime as this national policy issue suddenly moved to the forefront of the public's attention.

The Center for Gun Policy and Research hopes its work can continue to promote and inform efforts to prevent the unnecessary tragedy and significant costs of gun violence in the United States.