An Unintended Consequence of Privately-Funded Research on Guns

As usual, sociologist Jennifer Carlson has written insightfully about the consequences for scholarship of who funds research on guns. She finds that federal funding for research on gun CRIME persisted post-Dickey.

As federal public health funding dried up, private funding (seems to have) increased. I’m thinking of the Joyce Foundation previously and Arnold Ventures now. Probably others, as I don’t follow this closely.

It occurred to me that there is another negative unintended consequence of this shift to privately-funded research on guns: the lack of publicly available data on guns and gun owners. So many surveys of gun owners have been conducted recently, but that data is privately held.

I contrast this with my former field, the Sociology of Religion, in which scholars used private and public funding to create a publicly accessible archive of data (and many other research and teaching resources). It’s called the Association of Religion Data Archives. Gun studies scholars should check it out. It provides a model for the future as the field develops.