To claim that *no* gun research is allowed with *public* money is imprecise at best, and a lie at worst. No *advocacy* of gun control is allowed with *federal* money. The Dickey Amendment states: "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control." So, this applies to: 1. the CDC 2. spending money for injury prevention 3. for advocating gun control.

Not *everything* gun related is off-limits for federal spending; otherwise how would the FBI know that "[Firearms were used in 71.5 percent of the nation’s murders, 40.8 percent of robberies, and 24.2 percent of aggravated assaults](https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/latest-crime-statistics-released)"? State governments are free to spend their money on gun research: "[California's response to the federal funding blockade was a budget rider last year establishing the Firearm Violence Research Center at UC Davis and funding it with a five-year grant of $5 million.](http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-wintemute-20170714-story.html)" And your quote from JAMA (who, by the way, has been at the forefront at politicizing the gun issue and therefore instigating NRA action) goes beyond talking about federal or even state funding, and claims there is a lack of funding *at all*.

From the LA Times article:

>The vacuum in federally funded gun violence research dates to 1996, when Congress passed a measure by then-Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.), a cat’s-paw of the National Rifle Assn., forbidding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to spend any funds “to advocate or promote gun control.”
>
>A succession of pusillanimous CDC directors decided that the safest course bureaucratically was simply to spend nothing at all on gun violence research — even when they were specifically ordered to reenter the field by President Obama, following the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in 2012.

So the NRA did help pass legislation that has created a hostile environment for spending money on gun research, and this legislation has influenced bureacrats in deciding to limit research, but it did not *ban* reaserch.

Several other answers have mentioned the Tiahrt Amendment. @DJClayworth phrases it as "prevents firearms data from being released to anyone other than law enforcement - including gun ownership statistics and many gun-related crime statistics." However, the wikipedia page on it says that it "prohibits the National Tracing Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation." According to https://www.atf.gov/firearms/national-tracing-center "Firearms tracing is the systematic tracking of the movement of a firearms recovered by law enforcement officials from its first sale by the manufacturer or importer through the distribution chain (wholesaler/retailer) to the first retail purchaser. Comprehensive firearms tracing is the routine tracing of every crime gun recovered within a geographic area or specific law enforcement jurisdiction." That doesn't sound to me like "gun-related crime statistics", except in the broadest sense. That sounds to me like gun dealers are required to register with the ATF, and the ATF is prohibited from sharing the information they provide with researchers. This is data that people have been required by law to provide to the ATF, and there are valid privacy concerns. This is not public information that's being withheld. The DMV keeps track of who owns what car; should that be freely available to researchers?