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Every year in the U.S., more than 30,000 people die from things related to guns.


That puts guns ahead of HIV, Parkinson's disease, malnutrition, hypertension, intestinal infection, peptic ulcer, anemia, viral hepatitis, biliary tract disease, atherosclerosis and fires. Yet, the funding for research on gun violence lags far behind other leading causes of death, according to a 

Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers evaluated the leading causes of death in the U.S. and plotted them against the funding and publication of research dedicated to to them.


NPR's Cheryl Corley reports that in a different study published Tuesday by 

 researchers studied gun violence in Chicago over an eight-year period to explain how it can spread like an infectious disease." She said medical advocates have long argued that gun violence is a public health crisis, and that the researchers say their study helps prove this point.


helps show there must be a more coordinated approach to drive gun violence down, one that treats it as a public health epidemic and not just a policing problem.
The research published in 

 offers an explanation for the lack of funding: A 1996 congressional appropriations bill that banned funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be used to "advocate or promote gun control." The authors of the study note that "similar restrictions were subsequently extended to other agencies (including the National Institutes of Health), and although the legislation does not ban gun-related research outright, it has been described as casting a pall over the research community."


Research, though, has proved an effective tool in driving down mortality rates from other leading causes of death.

 study's leaders and medical director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told 

gun-related deaths can be reasonably compared to motor vehicle deaths

The text and a photo caption on a previous version of this post referenced a study on gun violence in Chicago that was published by 

Health

Laura Wagner

Author

The U.S. "has the highest rate of gun-related deaths among industrialized countries, with more than 30,000 fatalities annually," the study says. Yet funding for gun violence research is limited.

Gun violence should be treated as a public health crisis, study says

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