Just days after the nation’s deadliest mass shooting — at June’s Pulse Nightclub in Orlando—California’s state legislature voted to fund what would be the first publicly chartered center for firearm research in the country. The timing was a coincidence, but an apt one. And since then, progress has been steady.
This week, the University of California announced where the center will be headquartered: on a UC medical-school campus in the state capitol. It will be led by Garen Wintemute, a UC–Davis public-health expert who’s famous for going undercover at gun shows for his research, and fordonating more than $1 million of his personal wealth to studies on firearm violence. The University of California Firearm Violence Research Center will receive $5 million in taxpayer funds over the next five years.
The center is unique because comparatively few public dollars have gone toward answering such questions as “Which laws are associated with fewer gun deaths?” Some federal grants exist, but they’re dwarfed by the funding that goes to other health topics, gun-violence researchers argue. “For pretty much every other public health problem, there’s very substantial federal funding,” Wintemute says. “The National Institutes of Health has entire institutes devoted to, let’s say, heart, lung, and blood disease. But there’s nothing like that level of commitment, federally, to research on violence in general, let alone firearm violence.”
[For more of this story, written by Francie Diep, go to https://psmag.com/a-multimilli...e0c912f50#.luyw6nbac]
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