The National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research today announced $2.7 million in additional funding for its 2020 grant cycle.
The announcement of three new research awards is part of the Collaborative’s second major investment in gun policy research. Along with $7.5 million in research funding announced earlier this year, these grants bring the Collaborative’s total investment for 2020 to more than $10 million.
“These additional studies round out our 2020 grants announcement. These three new awards focus on critically important gun policy questions about populations at high risk for committing gun violence, and becoming victims of it, ” said Collaborative Director Andrew Morral.
This investment will fund three unique research projects from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund; University of California, Davis; and Michigan State University with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The projects will examine:
- Attitudes toward guns ownership, possession, and usage by urban youth, through qualitative and quantitative analyses. (Thurgood Marshall College Fund)
- The nature, structure and dynamics of California’s crime gun markets and the sources of firearms used in crime. (University of California, Davis)
- The factors that determine the approval or denial of extreme risk protection orders across six states. (Michigan State University and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)
In total, the Collaborative received 238 letters of interest and 48 full proposals representing $23 million in proposed research. The Collaborative’s independent, nonpartisan Research Advisory Committee selected a total of 18 projects including 12 research projects (including the three announced today), five dissertation awards, and one white paper award to fund in its second round of grantmaking.
The 2020 cohort of funded investigators include those with backgrounds in economics, sociology, criminology, psychology, social welfare, public health, nursing, medicine, epidemiology, and decision theory. In addition to providing necessary evidence on gun policies, the projects will help strengthen the research field by building, expanding, and improving data sets to explore questions related to firearms. A description of all funded research projects is available on the Collaborative’s website.
This year’s funding announcements mark the Collaborative’s second major investment in gun policy research. In July 2019, the Collaborative awarded an initial round of $9.8 million to 17 research projects.
“These latest research projects, along with the earlier-announced studies, will help to build the evidence base for gun policy,” said Frank M. Clark, chair of the Research Advisory Committee and past chair of the Chicago Board of Education. “This is essential for providing policymakers with the information needed to inform the development of fair and effective gun policies.”
The Collaborative has set rules to ensure transparency and replicability in the research it funds. Projects are required to post detailed analytic plans on OSF.io — a research transparency website — describing their hypotheses, measures, and procedures in advance of conducting the research. This ensures that departures from the original analytic plan will be detected. Projects are also required to share their data and statistical analysis code on the same website, so others can review their findings.
