August 22, 2019 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Once again, America’s gun-violence epidemic has captured the country’s attention. From the shock of back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, to the everyday gun violence that plagues cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Milwaukee to the toll of firearm suicides in rural communities, it is no longer possible to ignore this crisis.
As the public, policy makers, and the media debate the best approaches to stem gun violence, there’s one area in which there should be no controversy: the need for sound data and research to study gun violence and its prevention.
For 25 years, the Joyce Foundation has sought to address gun violence through research and public-policy solutions. We recently took a look back at the impact of our research grant making, tallying the dollars spent, the publications and key research findings that it yielded, and what we’ve learned along the way. The resulting report, “25 Years of Impactful Grant Making: Gun Violence Prevention Research Supported by the Joyce Foundation,” is a road map for how to invest in this issue in a way that builds on existing knowledge to improve public health and safety.
Since 1993, the Joyce Foundation’s investments in research have totaled over $32 million, or about one-third of the foundation’s overall grant making to support nonprofits working to curb gun violence. This relatively modest investment, averaging just over $1 million a year, supported 141 grants to 47 institutions, including universities, hospitals, and think tanks. Our grantees include top researchers at the leading universities in the field, including Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northeastern, Northwestern, and the Universities of California, Chicago, and Pennsylvania, among many others.
Public Health Problem
The report finds that the impact of these investments far exceeds the dollars we distributed.
Research supported by Joyce helped define gun violence as a public health discipline, distinct from merely a medical or criminal- justice issue. Treating gun violence as a public health issue helped point to policies and strategies that could prevent the violence before it occurred, rather than treating it after the fact.
Other studies described the epidemiology of gun violence, with different populations experiencing gun violence differently. For example, gun homicide disproportionately harms young men of color in urban areas, while victims of firearm suicide are more likely to be older, white men who live outside of cities.
Multiple studies find that access to guns makes it more likely that gun homicides and suicides and accidental shootings will occur. Where there are more guns, women are at greater risk of being murdered by their partners, and police officers are more likely to be shot or to shoot someone.
Joyce-supported research has informed the field of suicide prevention, finding that firearms are the most lethal means of suicide. People who attempt to kill themselves by other means are more likely to survive. Limiting access to firearms and other lethal means is a proven strategy for reducing suicide.
Shaping Policy
Understanding what leads to gun deaths and injuries has helped policy makers and others develop ways to reduce the toll.
These include requiring background checks by people who give or sell guns to others outside of family; permits for gun purchasers; greater oversight of gun sellers to reduce trafficking; and prevention and intervention programs. It is also important to bar domestic abusers from owning guns and to pass extreme-risk protection laws that allow authorities to confiscate guns from people who are considered high risk for gun violence.
Joyce-funded evaluations of these policies demonstrated their effectiveness and, in some cases, identified ways they could be improved. All these policies are now being enacted by states across the country and debated by Congress.
Drawing a Full Picture
Another outcome of the foundation’s grant making was the creation of the National Violent Death Reporting System, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Joyce and other grant makers joined together in the late 1990s to support the pilot effort for the system at Harvard. This system supports states’ efforts to collect data on every violent death in the United States — not just firearm deaths — by linking data from multiple sources to provide a complete picture of the circumstances surrounding the incident. Policy makers, public health officials, and researchers use the data to understand trends and patterns and to identify ways to prevent violent deaths. Following the pilot phase, Joyce supported education and advocacy efforts by public health nonprofits to expand the system to all 50 states, which was achieved in 2018.
Federal Funding Drought
All of this progress happened during a two-decade drought in funding for gun-violence prevention research.
The Dickey Amendment, enacted in 1996, barred the Centers for Disease Control from using federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” The effect of this language was to chill the CDC and other federal agencies from supporting even research to study gun violence.
Most foundations avoided the issue, too, seeing it as too controversial or too politicized.
The Joyce Foundation and a handful of other grant makers, including the California Wellness Foundation, kept the cause of gun-violence prevention alive. In fact, our report quotes several researchers who credit Joyce’s funding for sustaining the field and launching their careers as scholars of gun-violence prevention.
To encourage other grant makers to support this critical work, in 2011 Joyce launched the Fund for a Safer Future, a donor collaborative that invests in research on preventing gun violence and other strategies to reduce firearm deaths and injuries. Members of the fund include the Hewlett Foundation, the Kendeda Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, Jacob, Valeria Langeloth Foundation, Johnson Family Foundation, and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. (The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Just last year, Congress clarified that the Dickey Amendment does not, in fact, prevent research on gun violence. In addition, the U.S. House of Representatives voted earlier this year to authorize $50 million in new funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies to study gun violence. However, the Senate has yet to act.
Other grant makers, including Arnold Ventures and Kaiser Permanente, announced new grants this year to support research. We welcome these developments. While we know much more about gun violence and its prevention, we need to learn more.
For example, we know little about how policies are put in place at the local level, how guns move from legal to illegal owners, and what type of training is most effective for gun owners. We’re looking to explore these questions in our current and future grant making.
The Joyce Foundation’s experience offers a valuable case study in the power of philanthropy to fill gaps, take risks, and advance a field of knowledge and practice. When resources are deployed in a strategic and sustained way, movement on seemingly intractable issues is possible.
As Joyce takes stock of its 25-year history in this field, it must be said that the real heroes of this report are the researchers who have devoted their careers to studying gun violence — often at great personal and financial cost — motivated only by the goal of saving lives. We are proud to support them, in the past, present, and future.
Nina E. Vinik directs the Joyce Foundation’s gun-violence prevention and justice-reform program.
