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Government health agencies have spent more than two decades shying away from gun violence research, but some say the new spending bill, signed by President Trump on Friday, will change that. That is because, in agency instructions that accompany the bill, there is a sentence noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence. "I think this is a huge victory for our country and our communities and our children. This is one step in many to help stop gun violence in this country," says Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Democrat from the Orlando, Fla., area, where a mass shooting left 49 dead at a gay nightclub in 2016. But researchers who study gun violence are unimpressed. (Greenfieldboyce, 3/23)

Public health experts and former CDC officials say that, unless Congress actually appropriates money for that research, no progress will be made. Democrats have frequently railed against the fact that a 1996 amendment has effectively stopped CDC from researching gun violence. The mass shooting at a Florida high school in February reignited the debate in Congress. Democrats had pushed for a full repeal of the so-called Dickey Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funding to promote or advocate for gun control, but Republicans did not agree. (Weixel, 3/25)

Top appropriators in the House and Senate on Thursday said they are not interested in funding new federal research into the causes of gun violence. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in separate interviews they don’t see the need to give federal research agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) additional money meant to study the causes of gun violence. (Weixel, 3/22)

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is calling on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to begin research into gun violence immediately, following a new clarification from Congress. Markey is calling for the research, long a priority for Democrats, after the new government funding legislation passed by Congress included language clarifying that existing restrictions do not prevent the agency from researching the causes of gun violence, only from actively advocating for gun control (Sullivan, 3/23)

Yifan Zhang was finishing her PhD in biostatistics at Harvard five years ago when news broke of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. As a graduate student from China, specializing in highly technical design of clinical drug trials, she had little connection to America’s long-running debate over gun violence. But even now, she said, the anguished faces of those parents she saw on television remain seared in her memory.So when she heard about a gun-violence research project at Stanford University that could use the statistical skills she had honed on pharmaceuticals, she jumped at the chance. (Wan, 3/24)