It has not been lost on the American public that gun violence has become a cycle in our country. This phenomena could be roughly summarized as follows: the final data on the shooting is released to the public, some call for solace and quiet to let the families mourn, while others immediately jump to a call for action. This action can have a wide range of meanings from background checks, bans on bumper stocks, limits on silencers and bans on assault rifles, to more background checks. These tend to occupy the national spotlight and then, over the course of several weeks, fade quietly, only to be brought up again after the next shooting that captures the national attention. Thoughts and prayers are sent to the families of the victims and after some time, the event recedes to the back of the public consciousness. The existence of this cycle, and its seemingly unbreakable nature, has left some Americans weary of the debate entirely. Worse, the longer it continues, the more the public becomes apathetic and desensitized. Although solutions are put forth, they never seem to materialize in any tangible way — because another mass shooting will occur on average two months later according to a Feb. 16 article in The Telegraph. This leaves us waiting, seemingly helplessly, to be struck by tragedy over and over, until it becomes just a facet of our lives.

It may be time to accept that this cycle of gun violence, one uniquely American, is neither an inevitability to be prayed away nor a simple problem with a simple solution. America is perhaps the only fully developed First World nation that suffers from gun violence to this extent, according to an article published by NPR last October. In fact, compared with other countries that enjoy high average education levels and high average incomes — two trusted indicators of socioeconomic success, the United States should have an expected gun death rate of 0.79 per 100,000 people. Unfortunately, the actual rate is 3.85 deaths per 100,000 people — almost five times higher. Compared to its peers, the United States’ gun violence problem becomes even more concerning. Although there is a partisan divide over this uniquely American issue, both sides agree on one thing — there is, in fact, a problem in our nation. As with most problems of this scale, one cannot properly understand the current problem, nor formulate a viable way to solve it, without knowing all the facts. Perhaps now might be a time to take a dispassionate, clinical approach to this problem and derive a solution based not on passionate, pseudo-improvised rants, but on impersonal data. Unfortunately, this data is, in comparison with other problems of this scale, few and far between. This lack of data is itself a great barrier, but here, we find a cause that both sides of this bitter argument can dedicate their efforts to. All Americans, no matter their political affiliation or personal stance on gun control, can demand better data without shame.

This national lack of data on gun deaths, deaths by firearm and gun violence in general, can be traced back to Congress in 1996. The National Rifle Association pushed heavily for an amendment to a spending bill for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, so that the latter could not use federal money to promote or advocate gun control. The rationale put forth for Arkansas Representative Jay Dickey’s amendment was that this research and subsequent results were politically motivated and therefore non-partisan, and thus not appropriate for federal funding. This amendment did not in and of itself prevent the CDC from researching gun violence, as explained in an Feb. 15 article from The Atlantic. However, the CDC’s budget was lowered by the amount that was set aside for researching gun-related deaths. Because of this, a lack of gun-related death research has permeated the entire field.

Many pro-gun advocates are quick to point out that there are a comparable number of annual car deaths, but no one would propose something as ludicrous as actually banning all cars. Inadvertently, this argument actually leads into two very helpful solutions — while there are more auto deaths than gun deaths in the United States every year, there would be considerably more if not for the decades of research that have been conducted. Motor vehicle deaths have been scrutinized intensely, with a vast database of knowledge, thanks to the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, as detailed in the same Atlantic article. Furthermore, cars have been subject to many different regulations and policies to mitigate preventable deaths: Examples of these policies and regulations in action include the requirement of seatbelts, the presence of airbags in all vehicles, the law that headlights are required after sunset and before sunrise, etc. Meanwhile, there is not enough data to even formulate any safety regulations at all when it comes to firearms. Just as significant as the bottleneck on gun-death statistics is the pressure to stop cataloging weapons at all. Most notably, the Tiahrt Amendment was created in 2003 to protect the Second Amendment and prevent the formation of a searchable database of gun-owners. Unfortunately, its real-world effect has been less of a constitutional shield and more of an albatross around the neck of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The Tiahrt Amendment specifically forbade the ATF from “releasing firearm trace data for use by cities, states, researchers, litigants and members of the public, required the FBI to destroy all approved gun purchaser records within 24 hours, and prohibited the ATF from requiring gun dealers to submit their inventories to law enforcement,” as reported by the Gifford’s Law Center. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the many nonprofit groups centered around gun control, this means that a database exists could be used to track guns and identify the 5 percent of gun dealers that supplied 90 percent of guns used in crimes.

In the wake of yet another mass shooting, it may seem like all facets of the gun violence debate have been worn out, and there is nothing left to discuss. Indeed, it may seem like all the American public can do is argue fruitlessly and move on. This state of perpetual powerlessness and inaction may feel like the dark underbelly of American existence, but it does not need to be this way. This problem may seem insurmountable, but demanding both more and better data on this issue can and should be our first step. With the wave of activism and renewed passion that is the silver lining of the Parkland school shooting, it is very much within the power of the American constituency.