Gun violence is the least-researched cause of death in America, researchers say. It’s badly understudied and underfunded compared to research on other ways US citizens die.
Gun violence had only 1.6 percent of the funding predicted based on how common gun deaths are — in other words, $1.4 billion should go toward funding gun violence research, but the actual number is only $22 million, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It only had 4.5 percent of the number of publications expected. In fact, gun violence research was the least-researched cause of death. To make the comparison, researchers took cause-of-death data from 2004 to 2014, and compared that with funding numbers from a database of projects funded by US federal agencies.
Since the study only looked at actual deaths from guns and since so much gun violence causes injuries without death, the actual research gap might be even bigger, according to the scientists.
Nearly 20 years ago, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which stipulated that no funds set aside for injury prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could be used to promote gun control. The legislation doesn’t explicitly ban gun-related research, but people suspect that it has still discouraged this research. The funding for the CDC’s firearm injury prevention fell 96 percent since the amendment passed, according to a January 2013 report.