The Firearm Safety Among Children and Teens (FACTS) Consortium: defining the current state of the science on pediatric firearm injury prevention

Abstract

Five teams of FACTS researchers conducted a series of rigorous scoping reviews of the existing published scientific literature from the fields of medicine, public health, psychology, behavioral health, and criminology from January of 1985 through April of 2018 utilizing the Preferred Reporting Items for Scoping Reviews (Tricco et al., Ann Intern Med 169:467–473, 2018) framework to guide the search strategy, study selection, data abstraction, and analysis process. These scoping reviews characterize the existing scientific literature in five key areas related to Firearm Injury Prevention among children and adolescents (age 0–17): (1) Adolescent Firearm Carriage; (2) Risk and Protective Factors for Firearm Injury; (3) Primary Prevention Initiatives; (4) Long-term consequences and secondary prevention of negative outcomes after a firearm injury; and, (5) Effects of existing law and policy interventions on pediatric firearm outcomes. In this special issue of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, we present these five scoping review articles.