In 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped funding research into the causes of gun violence. And for decades the field suffered from neglect: low funding and a corresponding limited interest in academia.

Then came a series of high-profile mass shootings. And donations from billionaires. A result has been a recent surge in state and private funding for gun research, and a revival in interest among journal editors and young academics beginning their careers.

“It’s not just the availability of money for research,” said Jeremy Travis, the executive vice president for criminal justice at Arnold Ventures. “The zeitgeist has changed.”

Last year, Arnold Ventures, a foundation established by John and Laura Arnold, announced a splashy investment: It would be spending $20 million to fund research grants in the field, administering the grants through the nonpartisan RAND Corporation. And Kaiser Permanente, the health care provider, has set aside $2 million for its own research program.

Michael Bloomberg, the media executive and former New York mayor, has been spending on gun research for years. His sponsorship of endowed faculty positions at Johns Hopkins in the Center for Gun Policy and Research has helped several scholars.

States have begun making investments in gun research, too. 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 Garen Wintemute, a professor 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.”

Mr. Wintemute has made gun violence the central topic of his work. But for much of his career, funding was scarce, and he often dipped into his salary to subsidize the costs of his research. He said he expected the new investments to result in significant new advances; he described a big folder of study ideas in his office that might finally be realized.

In Washington, research funding on this 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 the researchers would have predicted based on spending on comparable health problems.

Gun deaths, the majority of which are from suicide, are roughly the same in number as deaths from sepsis, for example. But federal research funding for gun violence is only about 0.7 percent of that for sepsis.

Government Funding for Gun Violence Research Is Low Compared With Other Major Causes of Death in America

Cancer

H.I.V.

Diabetes

Heart disease

Lung disease

$10 billion in federal funding

Cerebrovascular

disease

Alzheimer’s disease

Hypertension

Atherosclerosis

Parkinson’s disease

Sepsis

Malnutrition

Viral hepatitis

Aspiration

Influenza and pneumonia

$1 billion

Fires

Poisoning

Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis

Biliary tract disease

Intestinal infection

Motor vehicles

Asphyxia

Peptic ulcer

$100 million

Penetrating wounds

Hernia

Gun violence

Drowning

$20 million

$10 million

Falls

1 death per 100,000 people

10

50

100

150

200

Cancer

H.I.V.

Diabetes

Heart disease

$10 billion

Hypertension

Atherosclerosis

Parkinson’s disease

Malnutrition

Viral hepatitis

Influenza and pneumonia

$1 billion

Poisoning

Fires

Intestinal infection

Motor vehicles

Asphyxia

Peptic ulcer

$100 million

Hernia

Gun violence

Drowning

$20 million

$10 million

Falls

1 death per 100k people

10

50

100

150

Cancer

H.I.V.

Heart disease

Diabetes

$10 billion

Hypertension

Malnutrition

$1 billion

Fires

Poisoning

Motor vehicles

Asphyxia

$100 million

Gun violence

$20 million

$10 million

1 death per

100k people

Falls

10

50

100

From 2004 to 2014

David Stark and Nigam Shah, Funding and Publication of Research on Gun Violence and Other Leading Causes of Death

By The New York Times

Shani Buggs is part of the new generation of gun researchers. When she went to school for public health seven years ago, she didn’t even know that violence was a subject she could pursue. She’s now a postdoctoral fellow at the gun violence center at U.C. Davis, studying interactions between drug markets, policing and urban gun violence.

Ms. Buggs said that the new money had not been her only motivator, but that it did make her feel more secure about her future. “It’s exciting,” she said. “What’s most exciting about it is that the increase in dollars will bring more researchers to the field.”

In an Upshot survey last year, researchers expressed interest in knowing more about many subjects, including the factors that lead individuals to commit gun violence — Ms. Buggs’s focus. They also sought research into how criminals obtain their guns and the effects of various gun policies, such as new state laws that allow courts to temporarily confiscate guns from people who are deemed a risk to commit violence. Such legislation has passed in 14 states — 11 since 2016.

Research publications on gun violence also appear to be rising, reflecting an enhanced interest by journal editors, not just scholars. “There’s new names on a lot of these publications,” said Ted Alcorn, an instructor at Columbia whose analysis of gun-related science publications over the past few decades was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. His study found that gun research had declined as a share of science research since the mid-1990s, but that it began to rise sharply in 2012, the year of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut.

The C.D.C. effectively stopped funding original research on gun violence after the passage of legislation in 1996 (the Dickey Amendment) that barred the use of C.D.C. funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” Republican legislators had objected to government-funded research concluding that having a gun in the home increased the risk of harm. But even before the Dickey amendment, the C.D.C. spent just $2.6 million a year on gun violence research. The National Institutes of Health funds some gun-related research, but not much.

Many major players in the field continue to lobby for a larger federal role, despite the new infusions of outside funding. At a recent hearing before a House appropriation subcommittee, Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, said there were some research tasks, like collecting and disseminating national statistics on gun injuries, that required government involvement.

He pointed to other public health crises — like car crashes, H.I.V. and cigarette smoking — in which research led the way to big reductions in mortality.

“If you think of firearms deaths along the lines of traffic crashes and smoking, you think about a really big project,” he said. “I think of this as a large effort of a magnitude that only the federal government would be able to support.”

Margot Sanger-Katz is a domestic correspondent and writes about health care for The Upshot. She was previously a reporter at National Journal and The Concord Monitor and an editor at Legal Affairs and the Yale Alumni Magazine. @sangerkatz • Facebook

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