Opinion: Here’s a key step to addressing gun violence in America

Editor’s Note: Rosanna Smart is an economist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and co-leader of its Gun Policy in America initiative to understand the effects of gun policies. Andrew R. Morral is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND; co-leader of the initiative; and director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, a private philanthropy that funds gun violence prevention research. The views expressed in this piece are their own. View more opinion on CNN.

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Barely through January, America has this year already experienced 63 incidents with four or more people shot and more than 4,200 firearm deaths.

These statistics do not come from official governmental sources, but are rather the result of information compiled and disseminated publicly by a small non-profit organization, the Gun Violence Archive, funded primarily by a single private donor. Our government collects no official data on mass shootings – and has no comprehensive data collection system tracking nonfatal firearm injuries – despite intense public concern about these events and the direction they may be trending.

The federal government does collect data on firearm deaths, although complete nationwide data that link whether individual deaths occurred in the same incident is not yet available. And finalized data is always a year or so delayed. By comparison, federal data on poultry slaughter across the country lags by only a couple of weeks.

What’s more, federal data collection on other aspects of gun crime and violence is abysmal.

This seems like a pretty fundamental statistic we should know, or at least have some decent estimate of. Measuring only firearm deaths and not all injuries may underestimate the prevalence of firearm violence by a factor of two to three, showing only a skewed subset of firearm violence. Because firearm assaults and police shootings often result in nonfatal injuries, federal data systems track only a portion of these incidents that disproportionately affect Black Americans.

Building a surveillance system for nonfatal firearm injuries would be difficult and expensive. In 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded efforts to support such a system in seven states, but the project ended after just three years when Congress cut the CDC’s budget in response to…