The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), America’s leading national public health institute, is barred by law from studying one of the deadliest phenomena of our time: guns.

According to a report from the Center for American Progress, 33,000 Americans are killed by guns each year, and the burden of this violence falls disproportionately on young people: 54 percent of people murdered with guns in 2010 were under age 30. Everytown for Gun Safety has found that a school shooting in the United States happens once a week. And yet, the federal budget, which funds the CDC, bans money for CDC research on gun violence.

But one state senator from California is trying to change that. California State Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) introduced the California Firearm Violence Research Act, SB1006, which, though it wouldn’t restore funding to the CDC, would establish a research center to study firearm violence in California. The center, which would be part of the University of California system, would take an interdisciplinary approach to examining gun violence prevention, including analyzing risk factors, societal consequences, prevention, and treatment.

“The [polarized] discussion is not productive in my view,” Wolk told Generation Progress. “There are people who think guns should be banned and melted down, and there are others who believe there should be no restrictions at all and no control whatsoever. Most people are in the middle on this one, and I’m one of them. I would like to know what policies would be most effective in reducing the incidents of death and injury.”

That information has been out of reach—on the federal level, at least—since 1996. That year, Representative Jay Dickey (R-Arkansas) authored an amendment, then approved by Congress, cutting off funding to the CDC for gun violence research.

“I think it was wrongheaded of Congress to listen to the NRA and to eliminate research into this area in 1996, and the congressman who did that is now a supporter of reinstituting this research again,” Wolk said.

In fact, Dickey has since publicy and unequivocally changed his position on the amendment, and recently made a joint statement with Mark Rosenberg, the former Director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

“We are writing to express our strong support for this bill, which we believe would help provide much-needed scientific evidence on which to base effective prevention efforts…” Dickey and Rosenberg wrote, in support of Wolk’s bill. “Well-structured research can be conducted to develop technologies and identify ways to achieve both objectives. We can get there only through research… Our nation does not have to choose between reducing gun-violence injuries and safeguarding gun ownership… States can serve as democracy’s laboratories for firearm violence prevention research, as they do for other major health and social problems. This is particularly true for California, where well-qualified researchers already work with uniquely rich and valuable data on research that simply cannot be done elsewhere.”

As the bill outlines, the center is intended to: “…conduct basic, translational, and transformative research with a mission to provide the scientific evidence on which sound firearm violence prevention policies and programs can be based. Its research shall extend to firearm violence as a form of terrorism.”

For Wolk, including the framing of firearm violence as a form of terrorism was a necessary part of the bill’s general expansion in firearm research.

“We’ve restricted [research in this area] for too long,” she said. “The center should not be restricted in any way, and we think the best and appropriate area of research includes topics including suicide, as well as accidents.”

National attention was shifted to San Bernardino, California this past December when a heavily armed couple killed 14 people and wounded at least 17 at a social services center before dying in a shootout with law enforcement.

The shooting in San Bernardino forced Americans to examine gun violence through the lens of terrorism, while also inspiring a conversation about technology and privacy.

California’s gun laws are among the strongest in the country. According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, in 2007, California was the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to require handgun microstamping. In 2014, it was the first to institute a gun violence restraining order law. And yet, the state still sees approximately 3,000 deaths from firearms each year.

For Wolk, that means there’s lot of work left to do. “The second amendment is part of our law right now and may remain that way for many many years,” she said. “It seems to me that we can polarize and get nothing accomplished in the center, but I would like to see if we can make firearms safer. If we can reduce the number of maimings and accidents, and if we can determine the most effective policies to reduce the violence and the incidents of death and injury, then we should be doing the research.”

This is not Wolk’s first common sense proposal. In October, Governor Jerry Brown approved SB 707, introduced by Wolk, which prohibits individuals with a concealed weapons permit from bringing a firearm on any public or private school (K-12), college, or university campus without permission of campus officials.

Two years earlier, Wolk proposed SB-755 which would have added offenses to the list of misdemeanors that result in a 10-year prohibition on firearms possession. Those offenses included those who have violated prohibition related to substance abuse and those who have been ordered to an outpatient program due to mental illness. Her proposal was vetoed.

Wolk’s current proposal will be heard by the Education Committee on March 16. If the legislature decides to establish the research center, the location of the center within the University of California system will be determined through a competitive process.

Wolk is hopeful about the bill’s prospects, noting its bipartisan roots: “This is a bipartisan issue. We have bipartisan support on our bill, and I believe there is support to do that research to reinstitute it at the federal level, but if it doesn’t happen at the federal level it should happen here in California, at UC.”

The UC system already operates billion-dollar, multidisciplinary research centers, including the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and the UC Institute of Transportation Studies.

“I think doing research on this topic will be a great step in the right direction and if our campus can be a part of that then that’s even better,” said Sydney Chanu, a junior at the University of California Santa Barbara. “As a research institution who better than us to take on the task if the government is not willing to?”