The American Medical Association ended two years of debate over its stance on gun violence Tuesday, voting to ask Congress to lift a decades-old ban on federally funded gun violence research.

The call to action comes days after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. A gunman killed 49 people at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub early Sunday before he was killed by the police.

Delegates at the AMA's annual meeting in Chicago voted in favor of a resolution calling for the organization to declare gun violence as a public health issue and to employ a "public health response" to address the problem.

"With approximately 30,000 men, women and children dying each year at the barrel of a gun in elementary schools, movie theaters, workplaces, houses of worship and on live television, the United States faces a public health crisis of gun violence," AMA President Dr. Steven Stack, an emergency medicine specialist, said in a written statement.

"Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries," Stack said in the statement. "An epidemiological analysis of gun violence is vital so physicians and other health providers, law enforcement and society at large may be able to prevent injury, death and other harms to society resulting from firearms."

(This story first appeared on Crain's sister publication Modern Healthcare.)