Background/Purpose: In 2022, gun violence-related injuries claimed more lives than motor vehicle accidents in the U.S. The burden of gun violence disproportionately falls on Black, Latinx, and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities. In 2020, the firearm homicide rate of Black youth (58.1/100,000) was 10 times that of White youth (5.5/100,000). That year, AI/AN youth had the highest firearm suicide rate (11.3/100,000) of any other racial/ethnic group.

Research is essential to identify and scale up effective solutions to gun violence. Further, community-led research is critical to ensure that these solutions are effective and acceptable and that they align with the needs and values of the most affected groups. Gun violence research has been historically underfunded compared to its societal burden. This situation began to improve in recent years with growing philanthropic investment and the thawing of federal gun violence research funding. To inform planning efforts for the Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research and Education, in 2023, we conducted a study to understand the characteristics of those leading research in this field.

Methods: We searched online websites and grant databases to identify investigators who received gun violence research grants from philanthropic institutions and federal agencies between 2020-2022. We sent these investigators an email with a link to an online survey consisting of nine multiple-choice sociodemographic questions.

Results: Of 137 grant recipients, 67 (48.9%) completed the survey. 55.2% of respondents identified as women and 58.2% as White, followed by Asian (13.4%). Very few identified as Black (4.5%) or Latinx (6.0%). One in six (16.4%) reported growing up in a working-class household and 26.9% were first-generation college graduates. Most had doctoral degrees (82.0%). Few (11.9%) were early career investigators with ≤5 years of research experience; the majority (41.8%) had led research for >20 years.

Conclusions: Gun violence research grant recipients are not representative of the populations most burdened by gun violence. Almost a third (31.4%) of gun deaths in 2022 occurred among Black people and 11.8% among Latinx; however, researchers from these races/ethnicities received 10.5% of grants. Further, even though AI/AN communities are highly impacted by firearm suicide, no researchers identified with this race/ethnic category.

Gun violence research funding is crucial to find and amplify urgently needed strategies and interventions that work to reduce gun violence. However, all phases of this research -from defining the research questions to determining which data to gather and the measures of success- must meaningfully involve the people with lived experience in gun violence. Gun violence research must be grounded in local knowledge and values and be centered on the voices and perspectives of those most affected by violence.

Renewed investments are an opportunity to examine grantmaking priorities and processes. Making gun violence research funding more equitable could entail establishing guidelines for equitable community-academic partnerships, developing funding criteria that prioritize researchers from communities with the highest gun violence burden, and providing material and technical support to Black and Brown researchers.