In the political arena, little seems to have changed in response to last year’s killing of 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut. Congress refused to toughen background checks for gun buyers, and states passing more-restrictive laws were outnumbered by those going the other direction.
In the world of scientific research, however, there is quiet movement. The latest development came late last week, when the National Institutes of Health issued a broad invitation for applications for grants to study firearms violence.
The NIH said it was acting in response to President Obama’s January memorandum ending restrictions established over the years against federally financed research into the causes and possible preventions of gun violence.
The NIH is the largest provider of federal money for basic research at American universities, and its move promises the most significant effect of the president’s order following last December’s school massacre.
“It’s wonderful news,” said Garen J. Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California at Davis, “and hopefully represents the beginning of a robust program of research and evaluation on an important public-health and public-safety problem.”
As Dr. Wintemute and other researchers anticipated at the time of Mr. Obama’s announcement, the new era of federally sponsored gun research does not set a goal of building justifications to ban gun ownership. Instead, the NIH said in its announcement, the objective is to identify evidence-based strategies for reducing or preventing violence.
Such violence can include suicide and various types of homicides not limited to guns, and causes and factors can include depression, obesity, and drug and alcohol abuse, the agency said. But evidence suggests that most suicides are related to a mental illness and many involve firearms, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas R. Insel, said in the NIH announcement.
5 High-Priority Areas
A critic of past government-financed gun research, Gary D. Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State University, said the NIH announcement did not give enough details to show any possible agenda. “It’s too vague for anybody to tell where exactly they’re going,” he said.
In general, Mr. Kleck said, the less that the NIH specifies in advance, the better.
The government’s agenda was foreshadowed by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council in a report released in June, in response to Mr. Obama’s request for an evaluation of the most important needs in firearms-related violence research.
That report identified five high-priority areas: the characteristics of gun violence, risk and protective factors, prevention and other interventions, gun-safety technology, and the influence of video games and other media.
Despite decades of study, much of it limited in recent years to privately financed work, many key questions still await further exploration. An analysis published on Sunday by The New York Times found that accidental shootings involving children occurred about twice as often as official records indicate, due to inconsistencies in classification methodologies.
The NIH said in its statement that it planned to finance three years of research into the causes and consequences of violence affecting individuals and communities, with a particular focus on firearms violence. It set a goal of identifying solutions that can be used in both clinical and community settings.
