‘A real chilling effect’: Expert details lack of funding for gun violence research

Gun violence has become a dominant topic of conversation following horrific mass shootings recently at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Politicians are still debating the best course of action, with Democrats calling for more gun control and Republicans focusing on mental health. Buried in that discussion, however, is another issue hampering real progress.

“When we look to understand what we do and we don't know about gun violence, we have to understand that, first of all, for most of the last 20 years, we have cut off most of the funding for gun violence research for those years,” Dr. Rebecca Cunningham, vice president for research at the University of Michigan, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "Since the 1990s, there was a real chilling effect on doing research."

Cunningham highlighted how for many years, the leading cause of death for children who live past infancy was motor vehicle accidents. The country responded by dedicating resources to understanding how to keep kids and teenagers safer on the road.

In 2020, guns surpassed car accidents to become the leading cause of death among children, according to research from The New England Journal of Medicine. That study found that firearm-related fatalities for those ages 1-19 jumped nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020.

Despite the sobering statistics showing the number of fatalities have been climbing over the past decade, funding for researching gun violence hasn't opened up the way it did for automobile accidents.

“There was a chilling effect for researchers for those years, where we were in some years only dedicating a million dollars a year for the entire country to study this problem,” Cunningham said. “That number has started to increase over the past couple of years, which is good news.”

However, she added, “it's still vastly underfunded. Our studies show that we're 30 times exponentially underfunded, compared to what we're funding for other leading causes of death, for example, cancer research in children or motor vehicle crash death in children. And that research is needed. People don't understand.”

Legal precedent

Research regarding the causes of gun violence can significantly influence how policy is crafted.

For instance, some policymakers have called on Congress to raise the age to buy assault rifles to 21. According to Cunningham, there is some legal precedent for that: When the U.S. raised the legal drinking age to 21 from 18, the country saw a 30% decrease in drunk driving deaths among teenagers.

“When we added graduated driver licensing laws that are implemented across all states at this point — which means that 16-year-olds need to have a lot of training and a lot of supervised time before they're allowed to have a deadly vehicle in their hands and go 60 miles an hour on the highway on it — that decreased teen driving deaths, again, by about 40%,” Cunningham said. “So there are certainly lessons we can learn from other types of injury prevention.”

In the case of the Uvalde school shooting, the gunman purchased his AR platform rifles just days after turning 18.

Given the legality of the purchase, “we do need to think about what that means for our availability and our access and how we increase safety in the same ways that we've done it for other aspects, like dangerous motor vehicles in the wrong hands,” Cunningham said.

Similar to how those convicted of drunk driving are often stripped of their driver’s license, she called for red flag laws (also known as extreme risk laws) to be expanded. These laws allow household members or law enforcement to petition a court to temporarily prevent someone deemed to be in a crisis from accessing guns. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, 19 states currently have laws like this in place.

“Red flag laws have been shown to have some efficacy, specifically when they're tied to having a felony associated with them — when they're enforced and enforceable,” Cunningham said.

'These regulations are not a step back'

A key hurdle is that the Second Amendment is a highly controversial issue in the U.S.

Pro-gun activists and the National Rifle Association (NRA), a highly powerful lobbying organization, have dismissed the idea of implementing any type of restrictions on the rights of gun owners.

Gun control supporters, meanwhile, have called for assault weapon bans, red flag laws, expanded background checks, and more.

During a recent visit to the White House, actor and former Uvalde resident Matthew McConaughey called on the government to act.

“Responsible gun owners are fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals,” he said. “These regulations are not a step back. They're a step forward for a civil society and the Second Amendment. Look, is this a cure-all? Hell no. The people are hurting. Families are, parents are. And look, as divided as our country is, this gun responsibility issue is one that we agree on more than we don't.”

According to a new Marist Poll conducted in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, 59% of U.S. adults say it's more important to control gun violence versus 35% who believe it's more important to protect gun rights.

“No one policy here or one prevention program is going to be the answer,” Cunningham said. “In COVID, in America, we got used to hearing about a multitude of layering of preventions that help people stay safe. And gun violence is going to be like that as well."

Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and health care policy for Yahoo Finance. You can follow her on Twitter @adrianambells and reach her at adriana@yahoofinance.com.

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