Coalition Urges Senate to Provide Funding for Gun Violence Research

September 26, 2019

Dear Majority Leader McConnell and Minority Leader Schumer:

As the Senate begins work on its Fiscal Year 2020 funding bills, we write to urge you to take action to save lives from the gun violence epidemic gripping our nation.

Since we last wrote to you in December of 2018, approximately 26,600 people have been killed by gun violence. Communities across the country have witnessed horrific mass shootings in schools, in stores, and at workplaces. At the same time, thousands of Americans have been gunned down in their own communities in acts of gun violence that rarely make the news.

The House passed its Fiscal Year 2020 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies funding bill, which includes $50 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct research into gun violence. As the first bill to include such dedicated funding in over two decades, we applaud this monumental step to allow the nation’s top scientists and researchers the opportunity to address this public health and safety crisis.

We know that we must understand a problem in order to solve it. Over the past several decades, scientific and medical research has led to policy advances in automobiles, public sanitation, and cancer treatment that have saved countless lives. We ask the CDC, the nation’s premier institution of public health, to apply similar dedication to tackling the issues of gun violence, gun deaths, and gun injury. The cost of inaction is too significant and we cannot wait any longer. We urge you to include $50 million in dedicated funding for gun violence research in any final Fiscal Year 2020 bill. The nation is counting on you

Sincerely,