Anthony Bolante / Reuters file

Crime scene investigators remove evidence the scene of a May shooting in Seattle that left six people dead, including the gunman. The Seattle City Council is poised to fund original research into the causes and effects of gun violence.

SEATTLE -- This city known for its left-coast liberalism is poised to become the first in the nation to provide direct funding for research into the causes and effects of gun violence.

In a move aimed in part at rebuking a 17-year congressional ban on federally funded studies of gun use, the Seattle City Council could allocate $153,000 to local injury prevention researchers as soon as next month.

“It will have significance in the fact that it’s a city doing it, not a state or a federal agency,” said Tim Burgess, the Seattle City Council member who has led the subcommittee promoting the cause. “It’s our statement against what Congress has prohibited for 17 or 18 years now. Shame on them for that.”

Burgess expects the proposal will be approved in April. If it is, the project will pay for access to and analysis of three large, public data sets in order to examine the relationship of substance abuse, mental illness, gun ownership, hospital injury admissions and deaths.

“One of the big needs right now is that there’s still a lack of data on the problems of gun violence,” said Dr. Frederick Rivara, a professor of pediatrics and a researcher at Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“One of the things that’s come up in this whole discussion of guns is mental illness and substance abuse. We’re planning to link existing data sets to identify that if you have these problems, what are the risks of having gun problems in the future?”

The hope would be to use the information to target high-risk patients and their families, and then offer interventions that might prevent future gun harm, Rivara said.

It’s a project that may have been funded by a federal agency such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a generation ago -- but not in recent years. Starting in the mid-1990s, members of Congress, at the behest of the National Rifle Association, cut the $2.6 million the agency previously had spent on original, peer-reviewed gun research and stipulated that no public dollars could be used “to advocate or promote gun control.” The money was later reinstated, but targeted toward traumatic brain injury, not the public health impact of gun violence.

In January, President Barack Obama issued a presidential memorandum reversing the ban, and calling on Congress to allocate $10 million for new research, part of a larger gun control plan. 

But the federal money has not been forthcoming, and is not likely to be, said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the University of California, Davis, Violence Research Program and an expert on firearm violence.

“There is no money for research,” Wintemute said flatly.

The need for research became even more glaring after a December gun massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., left 20 children and six adults dead and galvanized a national conversation about gun violence.

“Everyone in the country was shocked by the affairs in Newtown,” Rivara said.

The tragedy resonated deeply in Seattle, where residents already were on edge after a string of high-profile shootings, including a May 2012 spree in which a mentally ill gunman killed four people at a popular café, killed another woman in a parking lot and then fatally shot himself.

Overall, in the U.S., nearly 32,000 people die each year from gun violence, according to the CDC. The city of Seattle logged a rate of 3.6 gun murders per 100,000 population in 2006-2007, according to latest CDC figures. That compares with a national rate of 4.2 firearm homicides per 100,000 population. The city's rate of adult gun suicides was 4.7 per 100,000, lower than the 5.0 per 100,000 rate nationally. 

Burgess said council members reached out to Rivara and his team at the city’s trauma hospital. “He identified the need to do this research and that this kind of research if vital to preventing gun violence.”

Using funds from the city's $4 billion 2013 budget, with a general fund of nearly $950 million, made sense, both in terms of meeting local needs and sending a national message, Burgess said.

“I believe that cities often lead the way on new policy and initiatives that spread to states, then spread to federal government,” he said.

Not everyone is pleased with the notion of the city using public funds for gun research, including Dave Workman, a senior editor at Gun Week magazine and a spokesman for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Bellevue, Wash., just outside of Seattle. 

"What you're talking about is a clever way to make a study with a pre-conceived conclusion that will say guns are bad," Workman said, adding later: "I'm sure there are better uses for that money."

Rivara and Burgess said that they believe Seattle will be the first to spend city funds on gun violence analysis. Representatives for the National League of Cities and the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns said they hadn’t heard of other cities paying for basic research.

The amount of money may seem modest, but it’s enough to produce significant results, Wintemute said.

“It’s not merely symbolic,” he said. They can do a really meaningful project with it. High quality work in one place can have a national effect.”

It will take about a year to gather and analyze the data, Rivara estimated. He hopes the results will be as successful as a previous effort to identify trauma patients with alcohol abuse issues. That research resulted in an intervention that has become a national model -- and reduced subsequent alcohol use and repeat trauma admissions by 50 percent, Rivara said.

He’s encouraged by the support of the city. Like Burgess, Rivara is optimistic that the funding request will be approved.

“I think we have a very informed citizenry as a whole and an informed city council,” he said. “They’d like to know what they can do on their part to help.”

Related stories: 

• Obama plan eases freeze on CDC gun violence research
• Fewer gun deaths in states with most gun laws study finds

States with a heavier dose of firearm laws tend to have the lowest rates of gun deaths, according to a study released Wednesday by Boston-based researchers who argue their findings show "there is a role" in America for more rigid gun-control legislation.

"It seems pretty clear: If you want to know which of the states have the lowest gun-mortality rates just look for those with the greatest number of gun laws," said Dr. Eric W. Fleegler of Boston Children's Hospital who, with colleagues, analyzed firearm-related deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2007 through 2010.

By scoring individual states simply by the sheer volume of gun laws they have on the books, the researchers noted that in states with the highest number of firearms measures, their rate of gun deaths is collectively 42 percent lower when compared to states that have passed the fewest number of gun rules. The study was published online in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

As proof, Fleegler pointed to the firearm-fatality rates in law-laden states such as Massachusetts (where there were 3.4 gun deaths per 100,000 individuals), New Jersey (4.9 per 100,000) and Connecticut (5.1 per 100,000). In states with sparser firearms laws, researchers reported that gun-mortality rates were higher: Louisiana (18.0 per 100,000), Alaska (17.5 per 100,000) and Arizona (13.6 per 100,000). 

In Arizona -- just as the new study was released -- former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords returned Wednesday to the grocery store where she was shot and urged Congress to expand background checks for gun purchases. She told the gathered crowd and U.S. lawmakers to: "Be bold. Be courageous. Please support background checks." 

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on a bill that would stiffen penalties for people who purchase guns illegally for others, and to make gun trafficking a felony. 

Fleegler and his team openly acknowledged they could not prove a definitive "cause-and-effect" link between tighter laws and a lower risk of gun-caused homicides or gun-related suicides. But ahead of the expected Senate vote, the researchers said they did determine this:

In those states that have the most firearm laws, those states also have the lowest rates of household-firearm ownership.

"And states that have the lowest gun-ownership rates also have the lowest gun-mortality rates," Fleegler said. "So states that try to have gun laws that are meant to be meaningful, they seem to be able to actually have an impact. That’s an important thing to learn from."

The findings were quickly challenged by two critics,  a top gun-rights advocate and a leading expert on the nexus of public health and gun policy, who each questioned the merits of the Boston findings and the rigor of the science behind the study.

It sounds to me like some sort of sleight of hand from a political sense," said Dave Workman, senior editor at Gun Week magazine and director of communications for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, in Bellevue, Wash.

"If they are dancing around this cause and effect, I'm not sure that the public should warm up to that kind of a conclusion because it really doesn't conclude it, it only suggests or intimates something," said Workman, who served three terms on the National Rifle Association board of directors.

"It's presumably the result they wanted to get in order to have the public believe something. Is that fair? Is that good science? Is that good research? I don't know." 

Workman further argued that in states or jurisdictions where gun laws "make it difficult for law-abiding citizens" to buy firearms through legal channels, "that does not necessarily translate to lower fatalities."

"And, as proof," he added, "I give you the city of Chicago." 

In an accompanying commentary, Dr. Garen J. Wintemute of the University of California, Davis, Sacramento, wrote that the paper's conclusion "would be an important finding — if it were robust and if its meaning were clear."

Ultimately, Wintemute wrote, the new study provides no insights on the key questions facing Congress: "Do the (gun) laws work, or not? If so, which ones?"

"Correlation does not imply causation," Wintemute said in a phone interview. "The plain English way of saying this is: Just because two things exist at the same time, that does not mean one thing caused the other. That's what's being implied here. All they counted in that analysis was the number of laws in each state, not which laws. There's no information in this study on the specifics of the (state) laws and whether they were enforced or not."

"So in a sense, the only conclusion you could draw would be: Pass more more laws but it doesn't matter which ones or what they're intended to do," Wintemute said. "That's just silly." 

Fleegler's study was not related to a recent executive order by President Barack Obama lifting a ban on gun violence research funded by federal agencies such as the CDC. Fleegler said he used public data at no cost to conduct his analysis. 

Wintemute said the study actually underscores the need for well-funded research into the effects of gun violence on public health. 

"Until we revitalize firearm violence research, studies using available data will be the best we have. They are not good enough."

Related stories:

• Guns in America: The weapon of choice for criminals, but also a deterrent?
• Obama plan eases freeze on gun research

A little-known kibosh on government research into the public health effects of gun violence is expected to be lifted after President Barack Obama called Wednesday for renewed scientific inquiry -- and funding -- to address the problem.

Obama issued a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies to research the causes and prevention of gun violence -- and he called on Congress to provide $10 million to pay for it.

"We don't benefit from ignorance. We don't benefit from not knowing the science from this epidemic of violence," he said.

The move effectively reverses 17 years of what scientists say has been a virtual ban on basic federal research and is part of a package of new gun control policies aimed at reducing gun violence after tragedies such as the shootings last year in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn. It would encourage research including links between video games, media images and violence.

The action immediately was praised by scientists who said pro-gun advocates -- including the National Rifle Association -- had choked off funding for CDC firearms research starting in the mid-1990s and imposed a chilling effect on those who dared to pursue it.

"He's saying this is very important and I'm going to back you on this," said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, president of the Task Force for Global Health and director of the CDC's Center for Injury Prevention and Control from 1994 to 1999. "Basically, they've been terrorized by the NRA."

From the mid- 1980s to the mid-1990s, the CDC conducted original, peer-reviewed research into gun violence, including questions such as whether people who had guns in their homes gained protection from the weapons. (The answer, researchers found, was no. Homes with guns had a nearly three times greater risk of homicide and a nearly five times greater risk of suicide than those without, according to a 1993 study in the New England Journal of Medicine.)

But in 1996, the NRA, with the help of Congressional leaders, moved to suppress such information and to block future federal research into gun violence, Rosenberg said.

An amendment to an appropriations bill cut $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, exactly the amount the agency’s injury prevention center had previously spent on gun research. The money was returned to the agency later, but targeted for brain injury trauma research instead.

In addition, the statute that governs CDC funding stipulated that none of the funds made available to the agency can be used in whole or in part “to advocate or promote gun control.”

While that did not specifically prohibit firearms research, the language was ambiguous enough to alarm CDC officials and stifle scientists interested in gun data, said Stephen Teret, director for the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“CDC overreacted to that statement and became more reluctant to fund anything dealing with guns, even the traditional epidemiological research, so there was a chilling effect,” Teret said.

The NRA attacked some scientists, trying to discredit their research, endangering their jobs and even threatening their families, Rosenberg claimed.

“These were not mild campaigns,” he said. “When the NRA comes after you, they come after you with both barrels.”

Officials with the NRA did not return NBC News requests for comment.

The dearth of basic data means that policymakers and the public know little about the causes of gun violence that kills about 32,000 people in the U.S. each year. At the same time, Teret said, research into other public health problems such as automobile deaths has yielded dramatic results.

“When I first started, there were 50,000 people a year dying on the highways. Now it’s 32,000 and that’s because there’s been superb scientific research,” Teret said. “We need to be able to address gun-related injuries in the same scientific manner as highway injuries.”

Obama’s directive will immediately impact federal agencies that engage in scientific research about gun violence, said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. 

"We are committed to re-engaging gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health," she said in a statement. 

The move may restore the will to research gun violence, but it will be up to Congress to supply the funding to carry it out, the scientists noted.

If that happens, there are talented researchers poised to pursue the projects, said Dr. Frederick Rivara, a pediatrician and editor of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

He estimated that if CDC were given the green light for research now, scientists could have meaningful results that could be used to shape public policy within a year or two.

“We’ve lost almost 20 years of really waiting around,” said Rivara. “Given how large a public health problem this is, it’s a tragedy.”

Related stories: 

• Obama set to go big on guns
• Obama unveils sweeping new gun control proposals

Americans are far more unhealthy than people in 16 other developed countries, and it’s probably our own fault, experts reported on Wednesday. We die younger from diseases such as obesity and heart disease, and we are far more likely to be murdered and die in car accidents, the researchers at the National Academy of Sciences found.

U.S. culture has a lot to do with it and policymakers need to take action right away to reverse the trend, the experts who wrote the report advised.

"It's a tragedy. Our report found that an equally large, if not larger, disadvantage exists among younger Americans," said Dr. Steven Woolf, chair of the department of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who chaired the panel.

“I, personally, was stunned by how pervasive the disadvantage was across so many topic areas.”

Experts have complained for years that Americans spend far more on healthcare than people in other rich countries, yet have poorer health. The latest report from the federal government shows Americans spent more than $8,600 a year per person on healthcare – more than twice what countries such as Britain, France and Sweden spend, even with their universal healthcare systems.

Yet we don’t live any longer and we are not even healthier, the report by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine finds. The NRC and IoM, both parts of the National Academies of Science, provide advice to U.S. policymakers. The National Institutes of Health asked them to compare  the health of Americans to people in Canada, Australia, Japan and 13 European countries including Britain, France, Portugal, Italy and Germany.

“The size of the health disadvantage was pretty stunning,” Woolf told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Americans did worse in nine areas: infant mortality; injury and homicide rates; teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases; the AIDS virus; drug abuse; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; lung disease; and disabilities.

And many of these affect young people, not the elderly. Americans are seven times more likely to be murdered than people in the other countries, and 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun.

"I don't think most parents know that, on average, infants, children, and adolescents in the U.S. die younger and have greater rates of illness and injury than youth in other countries,” Woolf said.

“For many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high-income countries,” the expert panel wrote.

There were a few bright spots. Americans have lower death rates from cancer, the No. 2 cause of death, and do better at controlling blood pressure and cholesterol. “Americans who reach age 75 can expect to live longer than people in the peer countries,” the report reads.

No one reason accounts for the differences, the experts said. It’s likely a combination of factors, from a U.S. reliance on cars that keeps us from exercising enough, to a love of fast foods, to rejection of being told what to do.

“We have a culture in our country … that cherishes personal autonomy and wants to limit intrusion of government and other entities upon our personal lives,” Woolf said. “Some of those forces may act against the ability to achieve optimal health outcomes.”

It’s clearly not pollution or some other outside factor, said Ana Diez Roux, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, who served on the panel. “It seems to be a whole bunch of things acting together,” she said.

“Something fundamentally is going wrong to cause our country to lose ground against other high-income countries,” Woolf added.

Some of the report’s findings: The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than the other countries, with 32.7 deaths per 100,000. Other countries have infant mortality rates between 15 and 25 deaths per 100,000.

U.S. men live the shortest lives, 75.6 years compared to 79 for Swiss men, who topped the charts. Most of the difference comes in men who die before they reach age 50. U.S. women, who can expect to live on average to just under 81 years, ranked second-last. Japanese women can expect to live to be 86.  

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