Gun violence is among America’s most deadly and costly public health crises. But unlike other big killers — diseases like cancer and HIV or dangers like automobile crashes and cigarettes — sparse federal money goes to studying gun violence or preventing it.

That’s because of a one-sentence amendment tucked into the 1996 congressional budget bill: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

Its author was Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican who called himself the “point man” for the National Rifle Association on Capitol Hill. And for nearly 25 years the amendment was perceived as a threat and all but paralyzed the CDC’s support and study of gun violence.

Even so, a small group of academics have toiled to document how gun violence courses through American communities with vast and tragic outcomes. Their research provides some light as officials and communities develop policies mostly in the dark. It has also inspired a fresh generation of researchers to enter the field — people who grew up with mass shootings and are now determined to investigate harm from firearms. There is momentum now, in a time of rising gun injury and death, to know more.

The reality is stark:

Gun sales reached record levels in 2019 and 2020. Shootings soared. In 2021, for the second year, more people died from gun incidents — 48,830 — than in any year on record, according to a Johns Hopkins University analysis of CDC data. Guns became the leading cause of death for children and teens. Suicides accounted for more than half of those deaths, and homicides were linked to 4 in 10.

With gun violence touching nearly every corner of the country, surveys show that Americans — whatever their political affiliation or whether they own guns or not — support policies that could reduce violence.

If researchers say they “lost a generation” of knowledge about gun violence, then American families lost even more, with millions of lives cut short and a legacy of trauma passed down through generations.

Imagine if cancer research had been halted in 1996 — many tumors that are now eminently treatable might still be lethal. “It’s like cancer,” said Rebecca Cunningham, vice president for research at the University of Michigan, an academic who has kept the thread of gun research going all these years. “There may be 50 kinds of cancer, and there are preventions for all of them. Firearm violence has many different routes, and it will require different kinds of science and approaches.”

Cunningham is one of a small group of like-minded researchers, from universities across the United States, who refused to let go of investigating a growing public health risk, and they pushed ahead without government funds.

Read the full article about gun violence research by Christine Spolar at KFF Health News.