BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- A 17-year federal funding freeze on gun research is one reason UAB public health scientist Bisakha Sen is doing something no other researcher at the university is doing.

She is asking for money on a "crowdfunding" website to help pay for her research.

She has raised nearly $2,700 so far on microryza.com which allows scientists to post information about their projects in hopes it will persuade others to pitch in. Crowdfunding is probably best known through the Kickstarter.com website, which bills itself as the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. Microryza focuses specifically on scientific research.

Sen hopes to raise $25,000 to expand on a study she published last year which found that on a state level more comprehensive background checks of gun purchasers are associated with fewer homicides and suicides.

"It's really different and cutting edge," Sen said of the fund-raising method. "Crowdfunding my project may be a long shot - no one at UAB has ever tried anything like this before. But I really had no other resource."

Sen said she's crowdfunding because there is no money available for gun research and there hasn't been since 1996.

During that year, key congressional leaders, backed by the National Rifle Association, slashed the budget of the Centers for Disease Control which provided the lion-share of money for studies into gun violence.

In January, President Obama called on CDC to again begin gun violence research and for Congress to fund it.

Obama issued an executive order for the Centers for Disease Control to start research "into the causes and prevention of gun violence." And he called on Congress to provide $10 million to get it started.

But it is uncertain when the money might flow that way.

CDC spokesman Tom Skinner declined to elaborate on what Obama's executive order means in the short term.

"We haven't received any funding," Skinner said. "We'll have to wait and see if funding comes to CDC."

Bisakha Sen

The NRA public affairs office did not respond to requests last week and this week to speak on this issue.

Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at CDC from 1994 to 1999 when the congressional ban began, said ultimately it comes down to Congress and the American people.

"I expect CDC will be responsive to an executive order coming down from the president," Rosenberg said. "It will need to get funding for it and that will require support from Congress and an understanding from the public on how important it is."

Rosenberg said there are two goals that must be met to advance to meaningful research - how to reduce firearms injuries and deaths while preserving the rights of gun owners.

"We need to do both at the same time," said Rosenberg, a physician and currently the president and CEO of the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta.

It is analogous to cancer research, he offered. The cancer drug needs to kill the tumor but not destroy the patient's organs.

Rosenberg said the freeze on federal funding came about because the NRA leadership at the time decided "they only want to pursue one of these goals."

The NRA was able to mount a campaign, spearheaded in Congress by former U.S. Rep. Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican, and self-described point person for the NRA in initiating the funding moratorium.

Dickey has since reversed his stand against federally-funded gun research, coming out in favor of it in a Washington Post column last year he co-authored with Rosenberg.

The article outlined how Dickey engineered an amendment to a bill that removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget, which was the amount the CDC spent on gun-related research the prior years. And in that bill was a stipulation that none of CDC's federal funding "may be used to advocate or promote gun control."

The budget cut and stipulation sent a "chilling message," Dickey and Rosenberg wrote.

Dickey and Rosenberg noted that since the legislation passed in 1996, the U.S. has spent about $240 million on traffic safety research but "there has been almost no publicly funded research on firearm injuries,"

To quantify what has been lost due to the research freeze, Rosenberg offered up some numbers. Multiply the years of the moratorium by the gun deaths per year. That would be 510,000 gun deaths - "some of which could have been prevented had the research been done."

At UAB, Sen's previous research found that states with specific checks for restraining orders, mental illness, fugitive status and misdemeanors are associated with a 7 percent reduction in homicides and a 2 percent reduction in suicides.

She is raising money to expand the research to look at, among other things, the effect of state gun policies on the flow of guns across state borders and how teenagers get guns.

Last year, after Sen published in the journal Preventive Medicine, she said she got an email from a lawyer "affiliated with the NRA," she said. "He was very persistent in trying to find out exactly who supported my study."

She said she explained to him that she did it on time she has available in her job. But now plunging deeper into the unfunded research, Sen said she would like to pay two graduate students to collect, clean and compile the data.

Max Michael, the dean of the UAB School Public Health is supportive of Sen's fund-raising efforts to expand the thin ranks of gun violence research.

"We don't have any information on which to base sound policy," Michael said. "Nearly everything we know about firearms and firearm violence is anecdotal. This leaves it wide open for people to say whatever they want to say with nothing to back it up."