Barack Obama’s $4.1tn budget for 2017 includes funding for a wide variety of gun violence prevention measures, from increased mental health spending to grants for innovative policing programs and funding to support the nation’s background check system for gun sales.

Whether the US president’s proposed budget will amount to much more than a progressive wishlist is unclear. Breaking with precedent, congressional Republicans have announced they will not even listen to testimony from the president’s budget director this year.



“This isn’t even a budget so much as it is a progressive manual for growing the federal government at the expense of hardworking Americans,” the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, said in a statement this week.

There are more than 30,000 gun deaths in America each year, including roughly 20,000 gun suicides and 11,000 gun homicides. Despite a series of emotional speeches about the toll of gun violence in America, Obama has struggled to have an impact on the problem. Congress rejected Obama’s push to tighten gun laws after a mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

Obama’s high-profile announcement of new executive actions on guns last month has been criticized for being all talk and little action. The president’s much-heralded plan to expand background checks on gun sales amounted to little more than “an updated web page and 10,000 pamphlets that federal agents will give out at gun shows”, the New York Times reported last week.

But the small print of Obama’s 2017 budget proposal reveals a wider range of initiatives that might reduce gun death and injury – not all of them focused on guns or gun control.

Obama’s Justice Department budget includes proposed increases for a series of modest grant programs that address urban violence, which often involves guns. Roughly half of America’s total gun homicide victims are black men. Last year, cities across the country reported increases in shootings and gun homicides. Obama’s budget request acknowledged upticks in crime and violence in “many cities”, while noting that “violent crime rates generally are still at historic lows”.

Obama’s budget includes $5m to support the Justice Department’s new Violence Reduction Network, which connects high-violence cities with advice, training and easier access to federal resources. Founded in 2014, the network currently works with 10 cities, including Oakland, Camden, Chicago, Wilmington, Flint and Detroit. The new funding would allow more cities to join the network, the budget request noted. Justice Department officials have said there are roughly four dozen cities with violent crime rates high enough to qualify to join the program.

The president also requested $18m for community-based violence prevention initiatives and $24m for a program that focuses on improving safety in high-crime hot spots. These programs help cities adopt innovative crime prevention strategies that have shown evidence of saving lives. In past years, the number of cities applying for these programs has dramatically outpaced the funding available.

After a year of constant protests over police shootings of black Americans, Obama also requested a total of $129m for programs to build community trust.



The Counted, a Guardian project that tracked every police killing in 2015, found that young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.

Obama’s Justice Department budget includes increases of $17.5m for two different programs on police body cameras, $5m for a grant program to “improve diversity in law enforcement” and $20.0m to “facilitate community and law enforcement engagement” and to test ways to “reduce implicit bias and support racial reconciliation”.

The Counted also found that more than one in every five cases of people killed by the police involved mental health issues.

The trust-building initiative includes a proposed $7.5m “to establish an institute of excellence to improve police-based responses to people with mental illness, thereby improving both community and officer safety”.

Obama’s budget also includes a proposed $500m in new mental health funding, which would expand the behavioral health workforce and provide funding for early intervention programs.

“High-profile mass shootings tend to shine a light on those few mentally unstable people who inflict harm on others,” Obama said at the January press conference on gun violence. “But the truth is, is that nearly two in three gun deaths are from suicides. So a lot of our work is to prevent people from hurting themselves.”

The president’s budget for the Department of Health and Human Services included a $28m increase for a national strategy on suicide prevention, which would be modeled in part on an effort that “led to an 18% reduction in deaths by suicide in Scotland”, the budget request noted. The funding would go towards implementing a “zero suicide” strategy for people already in the behavioral health system, as well as to provide grants to help identify people at risk for suicide and link them to services. “Suicidal individuals often fall through cracks in a fragmented, and sometimes distracted, healthcare system,” the department’s budget noted.

The president also asked for an increase of $36m to hire an additional 200 special agents and investigators for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The goal of hiring more agents, Obama said in January, was “to ensure the smart and effective enforcement of gun safety laws that are already on the books”.

Record-breaking gun sales over the past year have driven an increase in the number of background check requests. Obama’s budget includes an additional $35m to help the nation’s background check system “keep pace” with these increases.

It also maintains $75m in funding for a comprehensive school safety research program, a new program created by Congress after the Sandy Hook shooting.

