US government cuts imperil life-saving gun violence research. As doctors, we fear for the future

Stoneleigh Fellow Jessica Beard and her peer trauma surgeon Elinore Kaufman have published an op-ed for The Guardian urging readers to support research to better understand and address the ongoing gun violence epidemic.

We don’t have a reliable count for how many people have been shot in the United States this year. We don’t know how many were shot last year either. Or the year before that. These most basic numbers should inform our gun violence prevention efforts. But they don’t exist.

This is the void of information that is created and persists when critical research is suppressed.

For those struggling to keep up with our erratic news cycle, what we saw unfold in February at the National Institutes of Health – with communication blackouts, funding freezes and cuts that will obstruct life-saving research efforts – may feel inconsequential. But make no mistake: the peril hanging over our country’s research efforts remains, and we in the gun violence research community are bracing ourselves for a dangerous situation we know all too well.

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