In 2019, Congress Finally Funded Gun Violence Research. Here’s How It’s Changed the Field
Researchers found in 2017 that if gun violence was funded at similar levels to other public health issues, it would receive more than $100 million a year — over four times the current CDC and NIH allocation.
Still, researchers say the funding boost has made a huge difference.
Sonali Rajan, a health education and epidemiology professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, published her first paper on gun violence 10 years ago. “We had no funding for that work,” she said. “It was just a totally different landscape. And now I have multiple doctoral students who are specifically studying this as an issue. We have an entire professional society. We have funding.”
Rajan, who is also president of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms, said some of the new studies have produced “life-saving insights” with the potential to impact public policy.
She and her Columbia colleagues received $2 million in 2021 and 2023 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a division of the NIH, to study how to reduce gun violence in K-12 public schools. The funding has so far yielded five published studies that have touched on an array of topics including bullying, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the impact of permissive gun laws on school shootings.
Rajan estimates that 90 percent of her work is now centered on firearm violence, which is “extraordinary,” she said. “And it’s not something that was even an option for me at the beginning of my faculty career.”
Where the Money Has Gone
The topics getting the most attention from researchers are the same ones that tend to garner the most public concern, including youth gun violence and gun suicide, The Trace’s analysis shows.
Guns are the Number 1 cause of death among people under 18. Last year, gun suicides rose to a record 27,300, accounting for 58 percent of all gun deaths.
Fifty-seven of the federally funded projects — nearly half of all of the grants — address gun violence among children.
Thirty-six projects deal with firearm suicide, and nine of those focus on military and veteran populations. Several projects also look at suicide among people of color, which is rising, and suicide among young people.
At least 23 studies have examined hospital-based violence intervention programs, which have been shown effective at halting cycles of violence and saving taxpayer money.
But there are other topics that haven’t gotten much attention. In 2018, a panel of leading gun violence researchers convened by The New York Times said they’d like to see more research on the origins of guns used in crimes, and how they get diverted from legal commerce into the black market. The CDC and the NIH have funded no studies on that in the past five years, The Trace found.
The researchers also said they want to know more about the root causes of violence and whether it’s possible to change someone’s behavior and risk level. Several studies are looking into that. Also of interest was safe gun storage, which has been the topic of 16 grants. Red flag laws, which allow courts to temporarily disarm people deemed a danger to themselves or others, were the focus of three grants.
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“We had no funding for that work. It was just a totally different landscape. And now I have multiple doctoral students who are specifically studying this as an issue. We have an entire professional society. We have funding.”
— Sonali Rajan, president of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms
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Only six of the grant proposals were for projects related to firearms and intimate partner violence. Ten grants were allocated to research into the intersection of firearms and alcohol, opioids, or other substances.
The Trace’s analysis drew from the federal RePORTER database, which tracks funding from the NIH, CDC, and Department of Veterans Affairs — agencies focused on gun violence from a public health or veterans-focused perspective. That may explain why some topics more closely related to law enforcement or criminal justice are underrepresented. The data doesn’t include agencies like the National Institute of Justice, the research and evaluation arm of the Justice Department, which has awarded at least $30 million for gun violence research on topics like community violence intervention.
The Trace also found that the distribution of research funding has varied dramatically in different parts of the country. About $88 million — or 64 percent of the total amount awarded since 2020 — went to researchers in just seven states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The University of Michigan, which has one of the country’s longest-running gun violence research programs, was the single largest recipient with $31.5 million, or 23 percent of the total.
Kelly Drane, research director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, co-authored a July report about how certain types of gun violence and affected groups are understudied. She said the uneven distribution of funding reflects the shortage of researchers nationwide, a lingering effect of the federal funding freeze.
“You can’t just add funding to a field and just automatically get a bunch of new researchers,” Drane said. “You can’t just flip on a light switch and it starts operating at full power. The field has to be rebuilt.”
The financial drought set the field back by a generation and contributed to a brain drain around the topic of guns.
A Growing Field of Research
Patrick Carter, co-director of the University of Michigan Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, said the new funding has been transformative. Where researchers were once warned away because of the dearth of funding, now Carter is seeing more junior researchers taking an interest. “To get the best and the brightest to focus on the problem, you have to have funding there,” he said, “because they’re not going to go into a field where they don’t think they’re going to have a research career.”
The shift is evident in grant applications, which reveal that researchers are using the new funding as an opportunity to become experts in the field. A 2023 proposal from Massachusetts General Hospital to study the intersection of substance use and firearm injury among adolescents on Medicaid notes that the funding will help the chief researcher, a medical professional with expertise in youth substance use, “acquire the knowledge and skills to become a firearm researcher.”
The increased funding has “basically breathed life back into the field,” said Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was awarded a $1 million grant to study whether permit-to-purchase laws reduce youth violence and intimate partner violence.
Crifasi recalls a firearm research conference focused on children and teens that drew around 60 researchers in 2018. “At the last firearm research conference last year, there were 700,” she said. “It’s just been amazing to see the growth in the field.”
She estimates that her research is still funded primarily with grants from private foundations, which have filled an important gap, she said. “But there are things that you can do with federal research dollars that are harder to do with foundation dollars. You can spend a little bit more time understanding the epidemiology of a problem or looking at multiple outcomes.”
Still, Crifasi said she is grateful for the federal funding and wants to see it grow. Gun violence is “an area that has such a significant burden of a problem, and investment federally does not even come close to matching it,” she said. “So I think we have a ways to go.”
Some stigma around firearm research remains. “I think people are still anxious about it because the winds of politics might change every handful of years, and people don’t want to be perceived as being on the wrong side,” Crifasi said.
Crifasi’s fears are justified, as the funding is susceptible to partisan politics. The U.S. House of Representatives voted last November, largely along party lines, to reinstate the funding freeze, but that effort appears to have stalled — at least for now.
“Losing this funding is very much something we all continue to worry about,” said Rajan, the professor from Columbia. “I just cannot underscore enough that federal funding for this firearm violence prevention research is absolutely necessary to reducing harms, to saving lives, to building healthy communities — all the things we want for our kids and our families and our schools.”
Jennifer Mascia is a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace. Chip Brownlee is a reporter at The Trace covering federal policy related to violence prevention and firearms. Fairriona Magee is a public health reporter at The Trace. This article is published courtesy of The Trace.
