Crowfunding sites like Kickstarter are best known for promoting quirky new consumer products and your best friend's latest film venture, but here's an entirely different kind of cause you can support: gun control research.

Nature recently reported that economist Bisakha Sen of the University of Alabama, Birmingham is using the crowdfunding site Microryza to raise $25,000 to study how state gun laws correlate with outcomes like firearm deaths and shootings. As Nature reported back in April, funding for gun research is notoriously hard to come by because federal law prohibits the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from supporting projects that could conceivably be used to advance gun control (though following the Newtown shooting, President Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control to divert more money into that area). Sen's fundraising drive- which is about $8,000 short with four days to go- is an effort to tap into the widespread disgust spawned by the recent failure of gun control legislation in the Senate. If successful, it would stand as an innovative counter to interest group paralysis in Washington, and might suggest that we should try crowdsourcing our laws, too. (Although we're already kind of supposed to be doing that.)

For the Globe's take on the connection between state gun laws and gun violence, see Leon Neyfakh's article "The gun toll we're ignoring: suicide."