Q: With all the gun deaths and injuries in the United States, why isn’t this considered a medical research issue?

A: Two years ago, President Barack Obama ordered the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to get back to studying “the causes of gun violence.”

The CDC had not touched firearm research since 1996 — when the NRA accused the agency of promoting gun control and Congress threatened to strip the agency’s funding.

The CDC’s self-imposed ban dried up a powerful funding source and had a chilling effect felt far beyond the agency: Almost no one wanted to pay for gun violence studies, researchers say. Young academics were warned that joining the field could kill their careers. And the odd study that got published went through linguistic gymnastics to hide any connection to firearms. The long stalemate continued until shortly after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when Obama announced several proposals, including reversing the CDC research ban. Done by executive order, ending the ban appeared to have broad support from a scientific community upset that gun violence as a public health problem was being ignored.

“A lot of people thought it would make a big difference,” recalled Jeffrey Swanson, a Duke University psychiatry professor who studies gun violence and mental health. But today the CDC still avoids gun-violence research.

The roots of the ban go back to 1996, when the NRA accused the public health agency of lobbying for gun control. Wording was inserted into the CDC’s appropriations bill that, “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.”

The CDC took this to mean it should avoid studying guns in any fashion.

“It basically was a shot across the bow by Congress on the part of the NRA,” said Mark Rosenberg, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention when the ban went into effect.

“All federally funded research was shut down.”

Timothy Wheeler, director of the group Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, said Congress had good reason to stop the CDC’s firearm inquiries.

“It was what we call advocacy research,” Wheeler said. “It was research done with a preordained goal, and that goal was gun control.”

But gun deaths and injuries are a major public health problem, researchers say.

More than 100 scientists signed a 2013 letter calling on the CDC to resume research to identify effective ways of reducing gun violence.

“I see no upside to ignorance,” said Richard Berk, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who signed the letter.

Private nonprofits — with some exceptions such as the Joyce Foundation — have skipped over gun-related research proposals.

“Sponsors were spooked to fund stuff that had to do with guns,” said Swanson at Duke. He said younger colleagues got the message: Studying firearms was a field without a future.

The few gun studies that received funding took steps to avoid detection. In 2011, the National Science Foundation awarded Swanson $300,000 for a study it described as “Testing Competing Theories of Violence.” But Swanson said the study evaluates the effectiveness of mental health firearm restrictions. He titled the same study: “Firearms Laws, Mental Disorder, and Violence.”

“I’m trying to be optimistic,” Swanson said. But, he said, the CDC needs to stop being terrified of gun research.

“No one can make up the role of the CDC,” he said. “There’s a legitimacy there that no one else can provide.”

– Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post