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. The bill will provide $12.5 million each for the CDC and NIH.
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.