30,000
35,000
40,000
Motor vehicles
Firearms
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
Annual U.S. Deaths by
Motor Vehicles or Firearms,
2008–2017
Ye a r
N
u
m
b
e
r
o
f
d
e
a
t
h
s
Federal Research Funding for the Top 20 Causes of Death in the U.S., 2004–2015
Research funding per life lost
C
a
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s
e
o
f
d
e
a
t
h
Heart disease
Cancer
Lung disease
Cerebrovascular disease
Alzheimer’s disease
Diabetes
Influenza and pneunomia
Nephritis, nephrotic
syndrome and nephrosis
Poisoning
Motor vehicles
Sepsis
Gun violence
Liver disease
Hypertension
Falls
Parkinson’s disease
Aspiration
Asphyxia
HIV
Intestinal infection
$10 $100 $1,000 $10,000 $100,000
Median funding: $4,852
$63
$182,668
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
.
DISCOVER 33
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:
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A
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E
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/
D
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C
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V
E
R
;
R
A
N
D
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on traffic safety research, but there has been almost no
publicly funded research on firearm injuries.”
The reason, ironically, has Dickey’s name attached
to it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
— the federal agency responsible for, among other
things, researching and reducing injuries and
violence — had long studied gun violence. But in
1996, Dickey submitted and helped pass the so-called
Dickey Amendment, instructing that: “None of the
funds made available for injury prevention and con-
trol at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
“The language did not ban research; it banned
advocacy or promotion for gun control,” says Garen
Wintemute, a physician and public health researcher
who leads the Violence Prevention Research Program
at the University of California, Davis Medical Center.
“But everybody saw the writing on the wall, and CDC
took itself out of the game.”
A 2003 provision to a Department of Justice appro-
priations bill, called the Tiahrt Amendment, dealt
another blow: It prevented the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from releas-
ing firearm tracing data — how illegal firearms flow
from manufacture, to sale, to use. Prior to Tiahrt,
such data had been invaluable to academic research,
says Morral.
“There was very useful scientific research going
on looking at how guns flow between U.S. states as a
function of how permissive state laws are in terms of
gun violence,” says Morral. The ATF also provided
research on “time-to-crime,” or the length of time
between a gun’s purchase and its use in a crime. Such
information could play a role in determining whether
future policies achieve their desired results.
The impact of both Dickey and Tiahrt has been
clear: From 1998 to 2012, the annual number of
academic publications on gun violence dropped
by 64 percent.
There have been small windows of renewed public
funding for research on gun violence, such as a three-
year period, started during the Obama administra-
tion, that has since closed. And private donations
— such as $2 million that the Kaiser Permanente
health consortium committed in 2018 to studying
the issue— have kept other initiatives afloat. But the
limited, disjointed efforts are no substitute for a long-
term, concerted focus by a government agency like
the CDC in tackling a complex problem.
WHAT WE KNOW
What we do know about gun violence in the U.S.,
from a purely statistical perspective, may surprise
you. Mass shootings make headlines and dominate
public discourse, but roughly 60 percent of firearm
deaths in 2017 were suicides — that’s 23,854 people
who took their own lives with a gun.
“Most of them are older, white men,” says Bindu
Kalesan, an epidemiologist and data scientist
at Boston University’s School of Medicine. In a
2018 study on suicide in the U.S. due to firearms,
Kalesan found that the average American firearm
suicide is a married, white male over 50, with physical
health issues.
In a separate study, Kalesan discovered another
Over the last decade, 374,340 people in the U.S. were killed by
motor vehicles, and 342,439 were killed by firearms. Despite the
similar number of lives lost, research spending on motor vehicle
deaths is nearly 16 times greater than on firearm-related fatalities.
Source: “Funding and publication of research on gun violence and other leading causes of death,” JAMA, 2017
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics
Among the top 20
causes of death in
the U.S., research
funding varies widely.
Funding for gun
violence research
receives $63 per
life lost, the second
lowest amount
after falls.