Up until recently, if public safety or public health professionals in Michigan needed access to accurate information about the number of firearm-related deaths, the most timely database that they would be able to access would come from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the most recent data in that system is from 2024.
Now, the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention has launched a tool to fill that gap.
Jessica Roche, managing director of the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, explained that the new Michigan Firearm Injury Near Real-Time Data System, or Mi-FINDS, will allow local leaders to make data-informed decisions about where resources are going in their communities and neighborhoods.
Michigan has a decentralized medical examiner system — meaning that in order to collect this type of information, researchers at the institute had to collect the data county-by-county, and are still working to get data from a number of counties, especially in the Upper Peninsula and northern Michigan. That also meant that, before the university institute began collecting the data, it was often too difficult or costly for individual community organizations to aggregate it themselves.
Roche also emphasized that the database includes all deaths from firearms — both suicides and homicides.
“Our rural counties here in Michigan are disproportionately affected by firearm suicides, and the populations in those counties are smaller, and so the rate is really high when there is a firearm death from suicide,” she said. “My biggest takeaway is that all of our communities, whether rural, urban, suburban, all across the state are affected by firearm death. And so there’s lots of possibilities here for us to really do something to prevent these deaths from occurring.”
The CDC database is still considered the “gold standard” by Roche and others in the field of firearm injury prevention, and is especially important for being able to see trends over time.
But the lag in that system is created because each state must submit their own data to the CDC, many of which, like Michigan, don’t have a centralized medical examiner system. The CDC then has to clean the data and ensure its accuracy before it can be published, Roche explained. The CDC’s data also only goes down to a county level, and the university database will go down to municipality and even neighborhood-level data.
While the existing lag in data is standard, Roche also emphasized the importance of having an independent system at a time when many federal databases are being altered, politicized or taken down entirely by the Trump administration.
“It has a little bit of protection, right, against any changes that happen with CDC data,” she said. “There is some concern in the public health community about the stability of those data sets in the future, and especially the kind of the demographic information that’s collected in those systems.”
The University of Michigan data also plays a somewhat different role because of its quick turnaround — because the data is close to real-time, it is not the “gold standard” in the same way that the CDC data is, since the available information may not be completely accurate immediately after a firearm-related death. But the information is available much faster, allowing a faster response in terms of local and state policies.
The work of the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention spans beyond this data collection and presentation — the institute runs trainings for firearm safety, studies the impacts of Extreme Risk Protection Orders throughout the state and creates resources like safe firearm storage guides.
“This system kind of helps complement a lot of the programs, so that we can kind of see which of our communities has the most need over time, where should we be really focusing our partnerships and our work,” Roche said. “We’ll be able to see with this system are there differences between where firearm injury suicides are happening and with firearm homicides are happening? Are there specific pockets in Michigan that maybe may not be getting the resources that they need, and where can the institute kind of step in and help provide those supports?”
For Roche, she hopes that community partners in public health and public safety sectors are able to use the new database to inform their decisions about where to put resources and programs, as well as helping them to see changes occurring over time due to the evidence-based work being done.
“We really want the system to be of service for our communities,” she said.
