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Abstract
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US lawmakers have reached an agreement that would fund gun-violence research for the first time in more than 20 years.
A spending bill introduced on 16 December includes US$25 million for studies on the issue, split evenly between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The House of Representatives and Senate are expected to approve the legislation this week, clearing the way for President Donald Trump to sign the bill into law.
“It’s a good start,” says Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who has been studying gun violence for decades. “Violence-prevention policy should be guided by solid scientific evidence.”
“Is it adequate? Absolutely not. But is it meaningful and is it important? Absolutely yes,” says Mark Rosenberg, president emeritus of the non-profit Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta, Georgia, and the founding director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), also in Atlanta.
The CDC says that 39,773 people died of gun-related injuries in 2017, the last year for which it has released a full analysis.
The federal government stopped funding gun-violence research after Congress passed a rule called the “Dickey Amendment” in 1996. It barred the CDC from using funds “to advocate or promote gun control”. That was widely interpreted as prohibiting the funding of research into gun violence.
Jay Dickey, the Republican congressman from Arkansas who wrote the amendment, reversed his position on gun-violence research in the years before his death. “Both of us now believe strongly that federal funding for research into gun-violence prevention should be dramatically increased,” Dickey wrote in The Washington Post in 2015, along with former NCIPC chief Rosenberg ...
Language: en |