“Because only through better understanding of this issue will we be able to pass policies to make sure we’re not back here and having the same conversation a year from today.”Aside from studying gun violence, Sakran is himself a victim of gun violence. A 1996 amendment restricting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from promoting research about the public health implications of gun ownership has had the effect of throttling almost all federally-funded research on how gun violence affects Americans. Researchers are just now playing catch up ― even though the CDC has yet to receive any funding for gun violence prevention studies. Despite the costs, both financial and personal, gun violence research gets comparatively little funding, especially when compared to other medical conditions that take a similar number of lives every year, Sakran notes. “For example, while gun violence is responsible for about as many deaths as sepsis is, funding for gun violence research is equivalent to 0.7 percent of the funding allocated for sepsis, and for every hundred articles published on sepsis, only about four are published on gun violence,” he and his colleagues write in the study.

Source: Huffington Post October 03, 2017 03:22 UTC