‘We Lost the Whole Field’: Scientists Work to Revive Gun Research After a 20-Year Chill

When Rebecca M. Cunningham started postdoctoral research, in the late 1990s, she wanted to study firearms as a health issue.

She quickly found that many mentors wouldn’t touch it. Journals published fewer and fewer papers on the topic.

“It was too political,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham, now a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, started her career just as the federal government began a semi-official “freeze” on funding research into gun violence and policy.

“We lost the whole field,” she said — an entire generation of junior public-health researchers who would by now be senior experts.

Now, in the wake of more and more-severe mass shootings like those that gripped the country this past weekend in El Paso, Tex., and Dayton, Ohio, scientists are starting to rebuild that field, hoping to push it beyond the political realm and back into its place as a public-health issue. “The field is rebuilding,” Cunningham said, “but it has to grow.”

“Mass shootings have galvanized public attention in a way that nothing else has,” said Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University’s School of Public Health. Although mass shootings represent less than 2 percent of all firearms deaths, he said, they are “horrific reminders of the consequences of guns” and their effect on public health.

Research into firearms as a health issue grew in the early 1990s. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revamped its violence-research division and funded some studies that focused on guns.

Gun lobbyists weren’t pleased. In 1996, with backing from the National Rifle Association, Congress attached a provision known as the Dickey amendment to a federal omnibus spending bill to prevent CDC funds from being used “to advocate or promote gun control.”

If the Dickey amendment wasn’t exactly a ban on research, scientists say it acted like one: Firearms research, as a share of public-health research more generally, declined from 2000 to 2017, according to a paper published last year in the American Journal of Public Health.

“The consequences of firearms are among the least well-studied contributors to population health,” the authors wrote. Scientists understood the amendment, renewed in each year’s spending legislation that followed, as a two-decade freeze on federally funded firearms research.

That has meant a dearth not only of research but also of researchers. “Population health research relies on funding to create training opportunities for junior researchers,” the authors wrote, describing an “enormous shortage of scholars — a lost generation.” (The NRA has rejected that narrative, saying “there is plenty of funding” for the research.)

As mass shootings have grown larger and more frequent, scientists say, that picture is changing — albeit very slowly.

“There is now more firearm research than there was before,” said Galea, who is an author of the paper. “There remains far less than there should be.”

His paper pointed to a “spike in public attention” in 2017, when scientific journals and media outlets alike increased coverage of gun violence and mass shootings. (Another analysis found a rise in scientific articles in 2012, following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., though “there are still few active career researchers.”)

More recently, states and private grants have pumped millions of dollars into research.

Perhaps most substantially, weeks after a shooter killed 17 people last year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla., Congress ended the implied ban on federally funded firearms research. While lawmakers didn’t scrap the Dickey amendment, which bars lobbying, they clarified that “the CDC has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence.”

With the federal “ban” gone, have the floodgates opened?

So far, not by much. Some scientists say the biggest change needs to come from Congress, which can allocate funds for firearms research. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a $50-million bill to that effect, though its chances are unclear in the Senate.

To Cunningham, those are positive steps. But she said states and private foundations can’t come close to supporting the sort of large-scale, foundational research that only federal funds can provide.

The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, has funded some research projects in recent years, but not on scales comparable to similar public-health concerns.

Cunningham runs one of those projects, the Firearm Safety Among Children and Teens consortium, out of Michigan. More than 20 researchers across the country are studying child injuries from firearms, much as one would study preventable injuries from events like car crashes. And they’re training junior researchers in hopes of rebuilding the field, bringing in postdocs, more than a dozen interns, and graduate students.

The NIH is directly funding the project with $5 million over five years — its largest allotment toward firearms research in two decades.

That investment is substantial, Cunningham said, but it’s “also a laughable amount of money, compared to what is needed for the field, or compared to cancer or motor-vehicle deaths” — particularly for a phenomenon that is a leading cause of death for children.

The CDC did not respond on Monday to requests for more detail on research funding, and the National Institutes of Health did not immediately have data available. In March the CDC told Politico that “dedicated funding from Congress would help CDC to move forward in this work.”

Two decades of lost research will take time to fill, Galea said. But more papers are being published, he said, and evidence already exists to support solutions like universal background checks. “While there is a shortage of firearm research, there is plenty that we can still do that would stanch some of this bleeding.”

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.