While more than 30,000 people die from gun-related incidents every year in the United States, research on gun violence is substantially underfunded and understudied compared to other leading causes of death, according to a new research letter published in JAMA.
To assess the prevalence of research on gun violence, researchers examined CDC mortality statistics from 2004 to 2014. The team established the top 30 causes of death and plotted them against the funding and publication of research devoted to them. Data on funding between 2004 and 2015 was extracted from the Federal RePORTER, a database of projects funded by U.S. agencies.
Based on the high mortality rate of gun-related deaths, gun violence was underfunded and under published when compared to other leading causes of death.
"Gun violence killed about as many individuals as sepsis. However, funding for gun violence research was about 0.7 percent of that for sepsis and publication volume about 4 percent. In relation to mortality rates, gun violence research was the least-researched cause of death and the second least-funded cause of death after falls," wrote the study's authors.
One of the key factors in the stifling of gun violence research is the Dickey amendment. The amendment is a rider on a 1996 bill designed to bar organizations like the CDC from using funds to advocate or promote gun control. The rider is named after former congressman Jay Dickey. Mr. Dickey has since called for the reversal of the law.
"I think a good parallel can be drawn to motor vehicle accidents," David Stark, MD, medical director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and lead study author, told The Washington Post. "Those kill about the same number of people, but that has been decreasing substantially ... All of that really starts from essential public research that determines the proximate causes of accidents — and it's only with research that you can start to develop plans and policies and initiatives."
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