The Dickey Amendment, an appropriations bill provision, didn’t literally prohibit all federally funded gun-related research from 1996 to 2018, but federal administrators acted as though it did by not pursuing such research.
This perception meant the amendment"had a chilling effect on funding for gun research," said Allen Rostron, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who has. Federal agencies"did not want to take a chance on funding research that might be seen as violating the restriction" and so"essentially were not funding research on gun violence."
In 2018, lawmakers approved language that said the amendment wasn’t a blanket ban on federally funded gun violence research. By 2020, federal research grants on firearms began to be issued again, starting with $25 million to be split between CDC and NIH.Kennedy said,"Congress prohibits the NIH from researching the cause of mass shootings."
Email interview with Daniel W. Webster, professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, April 22, 2024