Cynthia Miller-Idriss, American University:
Well, we have been studying these issues related to extremism for several years, extremist violence, terrorist violence.
And one of the things you see in the global data is that the U.S. has a disproportionate share of violent deaths by terrorism and extremism, more than about half the incidents and about half the lethality in the global data. And that's probably connected to guns, we thought.
So, why do we have so many firearms? How does that relate to extremist violence? Was our original set of interests in this? And so we really wanted to see, how do you address these two issues together? What can we find out by assessing some of the data and serving young people?
What most surprised me was how many young people already have access to a firearm, very easy access or somewhat easy access to a firearm. Those numbers are strikingly high, some 40 percent, as you just noted, and then another 17 percent said that they plan to have access to a firearm pretty soon in the next few years, so when they're old enough or when they have the money to do it.
So we found that — I found that to be very troubling data.
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