Gun violence research back on federal public health agenda: Funding requested ============================================================================= * Charlotte Tucker When gun violence happens, two factors have come together: a violent situation, and access to a firearm. Researchers who study gun violence ask themselves how to keep those two factors apart, but their work has been much more difficult for the past 17 years, during which federal funding for gun violence research has been virtually nonexistent. President Barack Obama changed that when he issued an executive memorandum Jan. 16 directing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it.” The memo was one of a number of steps Obama took to combat gun violence in the wake of numerous mass shootings and violent deaths caused by guns nationwide. “Right now, we’re in this huge public and political debate about gun control,” said Daniel Webster, ScD, MPH, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “I’ve been doing my best to tell us what we know about effective gun control, but we need more research so that we can have policy discussions.” Though the lack of federal funding has often been referred to as a ban on gun violence research, it was never really a ban at all, Webster said. In fact, the law only said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies could not use funds to advocate for gun control. “It began in 1996, after CDC funded some studies that showed that keeping firearms in the home increases the risk for homicide and suicide in those homes, and they came under a great deal of criticism from the National Rifle Association,” Webster told *The Nation’s Health*. As a result of that criticism, Congress first threatened to completely eliminate all funding for CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which had funded the gun studies, Webster said. But ultimately, it cut the center’s funding by $2.6 million — the amount that had been spent on firearm injury research. That decision sent a message to CDC that it would be prudent for the agency to be cautious about funding such research, Webster said. “What President Obama is doing is sending a clear message to CDC, as well as to other branches of government, that gun violence is a very important public health and social problem and that we rely on these agencies to support the research to make sound decisions about the best ways to keep us healthy and safe,” Webster said. Sara Newman, DrPH, MCP, chair of APHA’s Injury Control and Emergency Health Services Section, said the policy change has the potential to result in data that will help target gun violence prevention efforts. “When we limit our ability to do science and gather evidence, we limit our ability to affect positive change,” she told *The Nation’s Health*. But the president’s announcement does not mean that suddenly the floodgates of funding will open to gun violence researchers, said Arthur Kellermann, MD, MPH, a former professor of emergency medicine and dean for health policy at the Emory School of Medicine. Kellermann, who currently holds the Paul O’Neill Alcoa chair in policy analysis at the Rand Corporation, called Obama’s memo “very significant” but said it may be too early yet to know how consequential it will be. “The president can direct money to one issue or another, but it’s Congress that appropriates,” he told *The Nation’s Health*. As noted in Obama’s plan to reduce gun violence, released in January, the administration is calling on Congress to provide $10 million for CDC to conduct gun violence research, including a focus on the relationship between video games, media images and violence. “CDC will start immediately by assessing existing strategies for preventing gun violence and identifying the most pressing research questions with the greatest potential public health impact,” according to the plan. Kellermann noted that it was Congress that tried to defund the Center for Injury Prevention and Research, and said if Congress decides to “take on” the president over the matter, funding for other injury research may also be in peril, as it was 17 years ago. There is also the matter of recent cuts to public health funding, which would further reduce CDC funding and could severely limit the amount of money available for such research, he said. ![Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/43/3/1.2/F1.medium.gif) [Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/43/3/1.2/F1) At a news conference at City Hall in New York City in December, Chris Foye, center, holds a T-shirt with a photo of his son, Chris Owens, who was killed by a stray bullet in Harlem in 2009. Other survivors of gun violence and family members are also pictured. The news conference was held by city Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, following the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. Photo by John Moore, courtesy Getty Images Finally, there is the question of who would do the research. Since funding dried up all those years ago, the field has aged and seen relatively few new researchers enter the field, Kellermann said. “There aren’t, at this point, young medical and public health researchers who have chosen to engage in this topic,” he said. “The kind of work that needs to be done can’t be done as a hobby. Because funding wasn’t available, and people tend to go where there’s an opportunity for work, they haven’t come in to this field.” But for those who do, and if funding is available, the subject matter is rich with questions for them to answer, Kellermann and Webster said. Potential topics include how and why people — particularly people who are prohibited from owning guns — make the decision to acquire them, access to ammunition, the motives behind gun violence and gun sharing among youth. “If we’re successful in making guns less available to high-risk youth, but if they’re sharing those fewer number of guns, we will have less of an impact,” Webster said. Kellermann said it is also time to revisit the work of several decades ago to see if it still holds up today. “So much of the research was conducted the late 1980s and early 1990s, it’s important to see if those studies give us the same observations today,” he said. Judy Schaechter, MD, a pediatrician and researcher at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said she would like to see more research in the area of personalized guns — those that require fingerprint recognition or other biometric matching before being fired, for example — and the best ways to protect children from guns in the home. Schaechter said she is hampered by both a 2011 Florida law currently being fought in the courts that does not allow her to discuss gun safety with her patients and also by a lack of research on important gun safety topics. “This is a public health issue and we ought to be studying it like other public health issues,” she said. “We studied infectious diseases and motor vehicles, and we were able to see a decrease in terms of morbidity and mortality. It’s disheartening that for so long we’ve ignored such a killer and dismemberer for a population.” For more information, visit [www.cdc.gov/injury](http://www.cdc.gov/injury). * Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association