Gun Violence Research Receives Less Funding Than Many Causes Of Death

The Washington Post (1/3, Johnson) “Wonkblog” reports, “A new analysis” published Jan. 3 “in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that little has changed over the past three decades” when it comes to Federal funding of research into firearms as a “common cause of death and injury” in the US. Three decades ago, after “scouring a database of the research funded by the National Institutes of Health,” researchers at that time concluded that “a thorough review of research awards for 1983 failed to identify a single research project on the topic of firearm injuries.”

Now, the authors of the present study theorize that “if public health issues were funded based on their death toll, gun violence injuries would have been expected to receive about $1.4 billion in federal research funding over about a decade – compared with the $22 million that it actually got.” This time, investigators “didn’t limit their analysis to NIH; they used a database that contains projects funded by multiple federal agencies.”

Related Links:

— “The reasons we don’t study gun violence the same way we study infections,” Carolyn Y. Johnson, Washington Post, January 3, 2017.

Posted in In The News.