The New Gun-Violence Scholars

Courtesy of Cassandra Crifasi

With the exception of one sick day and some visits with his father, Garen J. Wintemute has woken up at 6 a.m., exercised, and gone into work seven days a week for the past three years.

In the eyes of many admirers, that daily discipline demonstrates what it takes to succeed in a demanding and lonely field. Dr. Wintemute, an emergency-room doctor, has dedicated his career to studying gun violence, as the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis Health System.

When he started, 35 years ago, there was almost nobody — and no money — in his line of research.But that has begun to change. A recent succession of mass shootings and a string of killings of unarmed black men by the police have ignited new fervor in the field, Dr. Wintemute said. People talk about the need for research into gun violence in ways they never have before, he said, because they are beginning to see themselves in the victims.

“It’s violence they can’t write themselves out of,” Dr. Wintemute said.

At long last, he can see a growing group of young colleagues — scholars finally able to take on the study of guns, gun policy, and its effects.

The new crop of gun-violence researchers might be less isolated than Dr. Wintemute, who has remained dedicated to his field despite the absence of federal funding since 1997. But they’re still aware that they have chosen a difficult, possibly life-changing career path. They must still navigate an uncertain funding landscape. And they must do so while dealing with the stress that comes with studying a subject embroiled in a very public, and very controversial, national debate.

Scholars in the Public Eye

Academics who study gun violence and gun policy occupy an unusual position in public discourse. Few other topics provoke such extreme responses from advocates on both sides of the conversation. That takes getting used to.

Debates ignited by high-profile shootings can sound like echo chambers of feeling instead of fact, said Cassandra Crifasi, an assistant professor and injury epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins University. As a doctoral student, she had no desire to do anything related to guns or gun violence because discussions about the topic struck her as so hyperbolic.

“Nobody could have a nice, normal conversation that seemed rational,” Ms. Crifasi said.

But eventually she realized that she could add a valuable voice to the field. Ms. Crifasi was raised in a household with guns, and she hunted pheasants and sage grouse as a college student. She and her husband now own firearms and enjoy visiting a family farm to practice target shooting at soda cans.

The public discourse ultimately did not deter her from the field. But that attention, and the slim possibility of unhinged reactions from extremists, are still things Ms. Crifasi thinks about. She’s had conversations with her husband about the outspoken people who might be reading her work, and she is “very thoughtful” about what she puts online.

Courtesy Shani Buggs

Backlash and threats were not things that Shani Buggs, a graduate research assistant at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, expected when she enrolled in a doctoral program in the department of health policy and management. When she first started, the year after the fatal shooting of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut, she remembers hearing discussions at the center about safety precautions for handling the mail they received.

“I remember thinking, ‘Whoa, this wasn’t communicated as part of the deal,’” Ms. Buggs said.

Stephen P. Teret, founding director of the center, has studied firearm violence for the better part of four decades. You never get fully accustomed to the threats and outrage, he says, but after a while “they’re not as novel as they were in the beginning.”

However, there are some that stand out. Mr. Teret once received a threatening letter in the mail that was streaked with multicolored highlighter and made no coherent point. He contacted the police; they found the writer, who lived out of state, and told him to stop such mailings.

A few years later, Mr. Teret was scheduled to speak at a conference in the same state in which that man lived. On a hunch, he checked the guest list. The man had signed up to attend. Mr. Teret asked the conference hosts to add a police presence.

During Mr. Teret’s talk, the man stood and started yelling at him and then reached down toward a metal briefcase propped against his feet. Suddenly Mr. Teret was swarmed by police officers. In seconds, they encircled him and shuffled him across the stage, out the door, and into the back of a police car. He caught a flight home that night.

Mr. Teret said he can recall every detail of that day. He still keeps the letter in his office desk. But he never considered leaving his line of research because of incidents like that. Most public-health scholars would feel that same commitment, he said. They’re a stubborn bunch.

“It would be a terrible thing if you let something like that prevent you from doing your work,” Mr. Teret said. “You’ve lost.”

Playing the Long Game

Mr. Teret does not mention death threats to students considering a career in his field because such threats are relatively rare. What he does prepare students for is the more common, but painful, emotional toll of engaging with violence on a daily basis.

As a gun-violence researcher, you become “a repository for some of the world’s saddest stories,” Mr. Teret said. Acquaintances and strangers contact you to talk about the horrible shooting that happened in their town, in their neighborhood, in their home.

“You carry those stories around with you, and that’s a very substantial weight,” Mr. Teret said. “And it does damage to you.”

One story has weighed on his mind the most over the years. A family friend’s 2-year-old son was killed when he was accidentally shot by a 4-year-old at a private day care. That death prompted Mr. Teret to study the impact of childproof guns for the next three decades.

Mr. Teret said he mentions this aspect of the profession to students and young colleagues because he believes he should get their “informed consent” before they enter the field.

Like Mr. Teret, Ms. Buggs said her mentors were honest with her about the toll this research can take. They have emphasized the importance of “self care,” she said. They let her know it is OK to take a break when the mental and emotional stress of the research becomes overwhelming.

Ms. Buggs decided to take a step back last month after two African-American men and five Dallas police officers were shot and killed in the span of a few days. She watched mindless movies, doodled in coloring books, and just talked “about something other than guns for a while,” she said.

The work both excites her and exhausts her. At the beginning of her studies, in 2013, she didn’t fully appreciate what a “long-game endeavor” researching gun violence and gun policy would be. It’s a reality that experienced academics like Mr. Teret have come to terms with.

“The best you can hope for,” said Mr. Teret, “is you can go home and say to your spouse, See this graph of the incidents of these horrible things happening over the last 30 years? See where it’s dipping down a little bit now? I think that I was maybe involved in getting that done.”

Ms. Buggs said she now understands the incremental change that occurs after years of research. She knows it’s a grind, not a quick fix. And she has started to use the seemingly constant stream of national gun violence as her motivation to keep going.

“The change may not come when you want it, and it may not come at the level you want it,” Ms. Buggs said. “But every step forward matters.”

A Trickle of Funding

For years, the single greatest obstacle to taking those steps forward has been funding. Though grant money for gun-violence research has fluctuated, it’s been scarce for the past two decades, said Dr. Wintemute — especially at the federal level, thanks to a 1996 Congressional measure known as the Dickey amendment, which prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from allocating money to promote gun control. Congress stripped the CDC of $2.6 million in funding, the exact amount the center had used to study firearm injury prevention the previous year.

But money has been starting to flow, little by little, into the field. In 2013 President Obama urged federal agencies to end their funding freeze on research. The National Institutes of Health asked for proposals to study firearm violence after the Sandy Hook massacre. And some states, like California, have stepped up their grant programs to make up for the dearth of federal funding, Dr. Wintemute said.

“We’re still talking about a trickle here,” he said. “But the ground was dry, and now there’s a trickle.”

Still, funding remains a concern for newer academics. When Magdalena Cerdá, an associate professor at the University of California at Davis and associate director of the Violence Prevention Research Program, first told her mentors that she wanted to study firearm violence, she said, they warned against it. It would be very difficult to get any money, they told her.

So she broadened her research focus to include other factors such as drug use and mental health. Ms. Cerdá said she doesn’t regret the hybrid path she chose. But if there had been more funding options available at the time, she said, it’s a choice she would not have had to make.

Ms. Cerdá has now become a mentor to other gun-violence researchers. One of them is Rose Kagawa, who recently started as a postdoctoral fellow in the program at Davis. (Dr. Wintemute is also a mentor.)

While getting her Ph.D. in epidemiology, Ms. Kagawa said, her fellow students shared a general understanding that “funding can be a question mark.” Confronting financial uncertainty in academe can be daunting, Ms. Kagawa said. And she worries that the recent increase in grant money for studying gun violence is just a phase.

“But there’s definitely hope,” Ms. Kagawa said. “I don’t feel like I’m going into some terrible dead end.”