Congress agrees to fund $25 million in gun violence research

Congress has reached a spending agreement that includes $25 million for gun violence research, the first funding in more than 20 years to study a problem that kills 40,000 people annually.

The money will be split evenly between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

While the allocation is less than the $50 million the House authorized for gun violence and safety research in a budget bill it passed in June, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who ran the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control in the 1990s, called the funding a gesture of historic proportions.

"It's the biggest amount that the federal government has ever put into federal firearms research," Rosenberg noted. "It signals an end to the drought of knowledge about preventing this significant problem."