In the mid-2010s, as a series of mass shootings set new records for lethality and turned the public’s attention toward America’s gun violence epidemic, the same question was raised again and again: Why won’t the federal government fund gun violence research?
Twice as much federal money was being spent on hernias and ulcers, which aren’t usually fatal, as on gun violence, which took nearly 40,000 lives a year, according to a 2018 accounting. The answer was political.
A 1996 measure pushed by the National Rifle Association had effectively banned the use of taxpayer money for research into anything that could be seen as supportive of gun control. After mass shootings in Charleston, South Carolina; Orlando, Florida; and Las Vegas, Democrats in Congress tried to repeal the de facto ban, and each time it was blocked by Republicans.
Finally, in 2019, there was a breakthrough. In the aftermath of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Congress struck a bipartisan deal to begin allocating $25 million each year to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for gun violence research. The surge of federal dollars was cheered by scientists, who quickly began applying for funding and making up for lost time.
September marked four years since most of the first projects received grants. The Trace analyzed federal data to see how much funding has been doled out, how that money has been spent, and which institutions are getting the lion’s share. The data includes money awarded by the NIH, the CDC, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which account for the vast majority of federal gun violence research funding.
We learned that the federally funded studies over the past five years have primarily focused on youth gun violence, firearm suicide prevention, and community violence intervention, including the systemic inequities and disparities that contribute to a higher burden for communities of color.
All told, at least $137.1 million in federal funding has flowed to gun violence research since 2020, accounting for 127 projects. That’s a marked difference from the preceding five years, when just $24.5 million was spent on gun violence studies. Annual spending averaged less than $500,000 from 2005 to 2015. Until 2020, funding primarily went toward studies addressing broader public health issues like suicide, alcoholism, or substance use that may have incidentally included firearm violence.
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.
The Biden administration this year pushed to increase the allocation to CDC by $22.5 million, but the proposal has not gained traction in Congress. “CDC is dependent on Congressional appropriations to increase the amount of firearm injury research it can support,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement to The Trace. “This proposed increase would enable CDC to fund additional research and evaluation projects to better understand and prevent firearm-related injuries, deaths, and crimes in the United States.”
Still, researchers say the funding over the past five years 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.
“There is nothing more important to VA than preventing Veteran suicide,” Department of Veterans Affairs press secretary Terrence Hayes said in a statement, adding that the agency has spent millions researching and evaluating suicide prevention strategies.
The Trace also found several projects looking 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.
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
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.”
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