Other states also should consider investing in research to better understand their own gun violence prevention efforts and where new programs or policies might provide the greatest reductions in preventable deaths.

Each of these initiatives is relatively small, but all can make important contributions to understanding gun violence prevention efforts in their states. Read Andrew Morral's testimony on reducing gun policy disagreements through scientific research and an improved data infrastructure »Īt the state level, California has made a considerable investment in gun policy research at the University of California-Davis’s Violence Prevention Center, New Jersey has funded a new Center on Gun Violence Research based at Rutgers University, Washington has invested $1 million in gun violence research at Harborview Medical Center, and five East Coast states and Puerto Rico have joined to form the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium. The science on which to base gun policy has advanced slowly since 2004, when a panel of the National Research Council concluded, 'If policy makers are to have a solid empirical and research base for decisions about firearms and violence, the federal government needs to support a systematic program of data collection and research that specifically addresses that issue.' Unfortunately, federal support for research that could help states and communities reduce firearm crime, violence, and suicide has been very limited since at least 1996, when Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from “advocating or promoting gun control” and simultaneously cut $2.6 million of funding from the agency, an amount equal to what its injury prevention center had been spending on gun violence research.Īs Arthur Kellermann and Frederick Rivara pointed out in 2013, the language of the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly prohibit research on gun violence or gun policy, but concern that any gun research could be viewed as advocacy led the CDC to avoid supporting gun policy research lest it invite another negative budget adjustment like that in 1996. Here, we review some of these challenges to the scientific study of gun policies and recommend ways to improve this body of research. Furthermore, data that would help researchers examine the effects of gun policies are often either not collected or not shared. But even among private research sponsors, research examining the effects of gun policies on officer-involved shootings, defensive gun use, and hunting and recreation-outcomes of interest to many stakeholders in the gun policy debate-is virtually nonexistent. government has been reluctant to sponsor work in this area at levels comparable to its investment in other areas of public safety and health, such as transportation safety. This is partly because, for the past two decades, the U.S. This does not, of course, mean that the policies have no effects, but instead reflects the relatively scarce attention that has been focused on better understanding these effects. Throughout the course of the Gun Policy in America project, we consistently found inadequate evidence for the likely effects of different gun policies on a wide range of outcomes.

Tell congress time up gun control