GunsGun violence research gets $50 million boost from private funders
In one swoop, a new $50 million initiative to boost funding for gun violence research is poised to eclipse the federal government’s efforts to understand the epidemic. Experts in the field say the fund, created by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, could advance understanding of the causes and effects of gun violence and inform public policy.
In one swoop, a new $50 million initiative to boost funding for gun violence research is poised to eclipse the federal government’s meager efforts to understand the epidemic. Experts in the field say the fund, created by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, could advance understanding of the causes and effects of gun violence and inform public policy.
The private push, if fully funded, would more than double what the United States government spent on gun violence research over a recent 10-year period, according a 2017 academic paper that sought to calculate the yawning shortfall in federal studies of an issue that is among the country’s leading causes of injury and death.
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Federal funding:
A model developed by Professor David Stark of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai assumed that the more Americans are killed by a given cause of death, the more the government will study that subject. Between 2004 and 2014, the United States saw about 350,000 deaths because of firearms, with a mortality rate of 10.4 deaths per 100,000 people. Based on how often people were dying from gunshots, Stark’s formula predicted nearly $1.4 billion in gun violence research funding and 38,897 publications.
In reality, gun violence research received only $22.1 million in federal funding and generated just 1,738 scientific articles during the decade in question. That shortfall became the centerpiece of widely covered analysis that Stark published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.*
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The investment came together quickly, considering its size. Jeremy Travis, the foundation’s vice president of criminal justice, said he and his colleagues were motivated by the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.
“The question we were wrestling with is, what can this foundation do to address the issues of gun violence given the newly energized conversation about how awful this problem is?” Travis said. “We support research. Federal research has been basically missing. The evidence base for good policy is basically missing.”
