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California’s Gun Violence Research Funding – How States can get around the Federal Funding Freeze

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gun-on-groundJust over a month ago, in the wake of the Orlando Pulse nightclub mass shooting, California’s legislature voted to establish a $5-million gun violence research center at the University of California. What makes this particularly newsworthy is that this is the first such publicly-funded research center in the entire country.

As you might be aware, the federal government has long had their hands tied when it comes to funding gun violence research, primarily due to NRA backing of a controversial law that makes it extremely difficult for any federal agency to gather or analyze statistics on gun violence.

And while it’s possible for private research groups, like universities, to fund research on their own, most colleges are notoriously hesitant to propose gun violence studies. Many fear that their funding will be pulled, especially when research can be disproportionately funded by a few wealthy donors.

But state legislatures have no such intrinsic restrictions when it comes to funding studies. And while they lack the funds and the reach of the federal government, they may be our best bet for researching the causes and possible solutions surrounding gun violence – something that has been nearly impossible to do for the last several decades.

In recent years gun violence research has been mostly funded by privately-funded studies, which have serious financial limitations, so this state funding is a welcome change of pace into an area of research that is woefully under-studied. Granted, $5 million is not a massive investment in the scheme of things – but it’s a start.  If other states were to follow suit, we might have some real data on our hands.

Why We Don’t Fund Gun Violence Research

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CDC Headquarters in Atlanta

Whether or not guns themselves are a problem in our society may be a matter opinion, but one thing that we should all agree on is that we should have good data on how and why gun violence is committed (as well as the who, what, where, and when).  Both private citizens and law enforcement deserve to know when they might be at risk and what they can do to protect themselves, while doctors would better understand how to identify high-risk patients with mental health issues that might predispose them to violence. This should make sense regardless of political affiliation or how you feel about gun ownership.

And yet we have very little data. In fact, we perform almost no research at all on gun violence in our country. And the reason is entirely political – provisions in the annual appropriations bill (which directs federal funds toward research) prevents any money from being spent on gun control… and for decades, the NRA has been successful at branding “gun violence prevention research” as a sub-category of “gun control”.

It was 1996 when we passed legislation intended to strip the CDC of the ability to fund gun control research. The law was taken a step further, however, and the CDC essentially stopped performing any gun violence research at all. Since then, this ruling has also been applied to the National Institute of Health (NIC). As a result, for the past 20 years the United States has collected virtually no data on gun violence that could be used to curb or head off future incidences before they happen. And the result is that we have only limited private studies to look at when trying to figure out what to do about gun violence outbreaks, leaving our law officers and doctors mostly powerless. Even the senator who wrote the bill expresses deep regret at the results of his actions, stating that the law has been over-interpreted and resulted in unnecessary loss of life.

On top of all this, the NRA has fought in recent years to restrict doctors from asking their patients questions related to gun violence prevention. While they have been unsuccessful in preventing doctors from doing their jobs, they still have managed to force language into the Affordable Care Act and other provisions preventing the collection of data. They have managed to keep medical professionals from treating gun violence deaths as a “preventable disease”, despite similar causes of death being treated as such.

While there have been efforts to reverse these restrictive laws and open up the field of research for the public good, so far these attempts have amounted to nothing. The NRA and legislative allies have decided that public knowledge is a threat to the 2nd amendment, despite the fact that most Americans support gun ownership. The most recent attempt to end the ban on gun violence research is likely to go nowhere, at least until public opinion changes on the matter enough to pressure congress into taking action.

For now, we’re firing in the dark.