News

Addressing global gun violence: a Lancet Commission on Global Gun Violence and Health

November 9, 2024

This Comment piece, published in The Lancet in November 2024, announces the launch of the Lancet Commission on Global Gun Violence and Health, a new interdisciplinary initiative to address civilian gun violence, which claims an estimated 600 lives every day worldwide. Authored by co-chairs Dr. Adnan Hyder and Dr. Lorena Barberia, the piece calls for an evidence-based, global understanding of the relationship between guns and health. The Commission aims to produce high-impact policy recommendations at the national, regional, and international levels to drive meaningful change in communities most affected by this preventable crisis.

Interdisciplinary Action to Combat Global Gun Violence | GHL 09

October 13, 2025

This panel discussion, hosted as part of the World Health Summit 2025 Global Health Lab, brought together leading experts to explore interdisciplinary strategies to address civilian gun violence — a major global public health crisis claiming an estimated 600 lives every day. Moderated by Dr. Adnan Hyder (Boston University School of Public Health) and co-hosted by the Boston University School of Public Health and the WHS Academic Alliance, the session featured speakers from Brazil, South Africa, and leading academic and publishing institutions, who examined the root causes of gun violence and shared insights from public health, political science, and policy research. The discussion emphasized the need for evidence-led, multisector collaboration and coordinated action across countries and regions to design impactful policies and reduce the global toll of this preventable crisis.

Global challenges for research on gun violence

This Comment piece, published in The Lancet, examines the key challenges facing global gun violence research, including restricted access to public data, government legislation that limits research funding and transparency, and the outsized influence of geopolitics on research priorities. The authors highlight how these barriers — illustrated through examples from Brazil, Mexico, and the USA — have hampered efforts to develop evidence-based interventions and policies to address a crisis that claimed more than 268,000 lives in 2023 alone. The piece calls for coordinated, multisector efforts between academia, investigative journalism, and civil society to overcome these obstacles and build a robust, global evidence base to reduce the toll of gun violence worldwide.