Researchers interested in understanding the causes of gun violence and, in turn, the best ways to prevent more incidents of gun violence — such as the mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub last week — have been frustrated with the limits on their ability to conduct research on the issue for quite some time. They haven’t been able to receive federal funding for their research on the issue for 20 years, requiring them to turn to private foundations and states for assistance.
Recently, however, there was a rare spot of good news in this space.
Last week, the California legislature voted to provide funding for a new research center on gun violence in the University of California system. The statehouse allocated $5 million to the center, called the California Firearm Violence Research Center, that will last for five years.
More than 10,000 people die by gun murders every year and nearly 20,000 die by gun suicide. Gun deaths and non-fatal injuries together add up to more than 100,000 people shot by guns, according to Politifact analysis of CDC data. But, thanks to dogged lobbying efforts from the National Rifle Association to cast any research on the issue as “gun control advocacy,” Congress has continued to refuse funding for researchers to study why and how gun violence happens.
More than 10,000 people die by gun murders every year.
California’s funding for a new center will definitely help fill some of the gap in the research on gun violence. Garen J. Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine at University of California, Davis and director of the university’s Violence Prevention Research Program, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that $5 million is a “huge” amount of money for the field, and said in his interview with the publication, “It’s one of the reasons so few people do work in this field, because so little of that money has been available.”
That brings us to the question: Could states all over the country provide the funding necessary to bring more researchers into the field and discover more information about gun violence?
Unfortunately, universities may not have enough resources to accomplish that goal. State funding to universities has been stagnant or declining over the years. The small gains that have been made usually aren’t above pre-recessions levels, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Forty-five states spent less per student in the 2015–16 school year than before the recession, the CBPP data shows.
When you look at the highest ranked colleges and universities for the best funding for research and development by BestColleges.com, you see the amount that states provide is paltry compared to the funding contributed by the federal government — sometimes to a laughable degree. For example, the federal government provided $791,729 in funding for research and development at the University of Michigan, ranked No. 2 behind John Hopkins University for R&D; funding, but the state contributed $639.
Dr. Daniel Webster, director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has received grants from the CDC to study prevention programs to reduce gun violence. But he has not received any funding to study the role of guns in gun violence, which would include looking at suppliers of guns — and said he doesn’t think states will support these efforts in the long term. Although some private foundations have helped contribute to funding these research efforts, Webster said that without funding from the federal government, and with anemic funding from states, it will continue to be a challenge for researchers to ask very essential questions about gun violence.
According to Webster, there are still questions about how guns get into the hands of high-risk individuals, what sort of legal disincentives people need to stop pursuing gun ownership, and what kinds of altercations people are having before gun violence occurs. And there’s one especially big research gap Webster said researchers need to devote more resources to: exploring how to prevent those at risk of suicide from getting access to a gun.
“The most common cause of deaths from firearms is from suicide and easy access to guns greatly elevates the risk for suicide, so what has been understudied is what are the most effective ways to reduce access to guns for those at risk of suicide?” Webster said.
We’ve gotten a very cloudy picture of what these events are like.
Although there is a lot of information on who the victims of these gun violence crimes are, the nature of the incidents is less clear. Webster said that early 1990s research found that most common kind of event before a homicide was an argument — and since no one knew what that argument looked like, violence prevention programs assumed two rational and clear-headed individuals could de-escalate a situation before it became violent. But that may not actually be the case.
“They weren’t some kind of even-handed disagreement. Often they involved one person or group trying to exert dominance over another and so what one does about those interactions is quite different if you think you have two entities that are on the same plane, that you’re trying to mediate something as opposed to one is more of the aggressor,” Webster said. “We’ve gotten a very cloudy picture of what these events are like and what we can do about them.”
Although researchers are not optimistic they will receive enough funding anytime soon, the new center in California may have a positive effect in other ways.
Ever since restrictions were placed on gun violence research, researchers in the field have started studying other issues and some students have even been dissuaded from pursuing the field early in their careers. But there is hope that the center will convince young researchers that the field does have a future, and make it more likely for some academics to join the field. In an email to ThinkProgress, Wintemute referenced John Hopkins University, Harvard University and Northeastern University as schools that are doing good work researching the issue, and said the University of Washington may also have potential to produce good research on gun violence.