In 1996, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped funding research into the causes of gun violence. The field has long suffered from low funding and a corresponding limited interest in academia. Then came high-profile mass shootings and donations from billionaires. A result has been a surge in state and private funding for gun research, and a revival in interest among journal editors and young academics beginning their careers, the New York Times reports. “It’s not just the availability of money for research,” said Jeremy Travis of Arnold Ventures. “The zeitgeist has changed.” Last year, Arnold, a foundation established by John and Laura Arnold, said it would spend $20 million to fund research grants in the field, administering them through the RAND Corporation. Health care provider Kaiser Permanente has set aside $2 million for its own research program.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has sponsored endowed faculty positions at Johns Hopkins in the Center for Gun Policy and Research. In the states, a $5 million investment from California has led to the formation of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. New Jersey’s legislature approved $2 million to establish a center at Rutgers University. Several more states and the District of Columbia are considering similar programs. “All these new people are coming,” said Prof. Garen Wintemute, who directs the program at Davis. “It used to be a dozen people in the country — now there are a dozen people in my building.” In Washington, D.C., however, research funding on the divisive topic remains anemic. A recent analysis found that gun research receives substantially less funding from the federal government than research for other major causes of death — only 1.6 percent of the funding researchers would have predicted based on spending on comparable health problems.