A Trace analysis published last year found that the federal government had invested more than $137 million in gun violence research since 2020 -- an unprecedented amount. In 2025, there have already been dozens of important studies published in academic journals on pivotal aspects of the toll of the gun violence epidemic including mental, physical, and social health. But just as the field is breaking new ground and expanding representation, devastating cuts to federal health agencies and leading national research centers are threatening to stifle it. Before funding runs out for the foreseeable future, experts are disseminating and cataloguing as much work as possible. In this work -- on firearm homicide, suicide, interpersonal violence, and survivorship -- researchers and violence prevention workers can discover myriad landmark and nuanced findings, helping them better understand the broader landscape of the public health crisis and develop their own approaches to further stemming gun violence in America.
At The Trace, we write about some of the latest insights in the field, but can't cover everything. In an effort to track more of these key developments, we're launching The Roundup, a new quarterly series collecting some of the recent research that's shaping public understanding of firearm violence in this country. This selection of research represents only a handful, but each of these studies is an integral step in the public health approach to addressing a crisis that claims more than 40,000 lives annually. Collectively, they can help us rethink current policy conversations and propose promising prevention strategies.
An estimated 37 percent of gunshot injuries are attributed to accidental shooting deaths, and the toll on children is mostly untraceable. Research has found that safe storage practices have a significant influence in mitigating firearm risk and preventing such shootings, and this study adds to the information that could result in a more nuanced approach to implementing the practice, yet to be widely accepted.
The study, by researchers from the Metropolitan State University, the University of Colorado - Boulder, and Hamline University, analyzes what factors contribute to gun owners' storage practices, in an effort that researchers said potentially "provides insights for targeted public health interventions to reduce gun injury."
It found that about half of gun owners reported keeping their firearms locked and unloaded, and around two-thirds reported they could access a gun in under a minute. Secure storage was more commonly reported among women, people with children at home, those who owned fewer guns, and people who primarily used their firearms for activities like hunting, sport shooting, or collecting. By contrast, men, Republicans, and people with past histories of gang involvement or incarceration were less likely to secure their firearms.
"These findings reveal complex relationships between individual demographics, personal experiences, fear, and firearm storage practices," the authors wrote, "highlighting the promise of legislative approaches to firearm safety and opportunities for targeted interventions."
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its concurrent increase in gun violence was a paradigm shift in the health community, turning national attention to dual crises which experts were working to understand in real time. But it was the increase in violence, particularly among young people, that sparked a national conversation and became a huge point of contention in the gun violence lexicon.
According to the study, by researchers From the Boston University School of Public Health and the University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center, some of the most significant shifts occurred among young people and adults over the age of 30 after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing that the relationship between age and risk of firearm mortality had changed. Previously, the highest risk of victimization was at age 21, but it has moved down to 19, and homicide rates among children up to 16 have substantially increased. These age-specific changes were most noticeable in 2022 and 2023.
Real-time shooting data, one of the tools the authors suggest is most needed, is among the biggest challenges facing gun violence research today. In the case of age-specific trends, knowing in real time that gun violence was still going up among 10 to 16-year-olds while national trends declined could have proven pivotal in mitigating risk more quickly and targeting strategies -- saving lives.
"Adapting [prevention] strategies to school-age teens could include building out school-based interrupter models," said Jonathan Jay, a public health scientist and lead author of the study. "Plus, adapting the environments in and around schools to make them safer and more engaging and enriching."
Research has consistently shown that defensive gun use, a concept propagated by the gun lobby for decades, is rare.
This recent addition to that scholarship comes from a wide, nationally representative sample of 3,000 survey respondents and looks not only at recent defensive use, but how it plays out across a person's lifetime.
The researchers found that 92 percent of participants with access to a firearm reported never using one in self-defense. In the previous year, less than 1 percent of respondents had shown or mentioned their firearm in a threatening manner, fired near a threat, or directly at one. Gun violence exposure was much more common, the findings show, with more than one-third of respondents reporting they knew someone who had died by firearm suicide, and nearly a third reporting they'd heard gunshots in their neighborhood.
The results "emphasize the significant vicarious toll of gun violence in the U.S. that far outweighs the frequency of [defensive gun use]," the authors wrote, and come at a time when the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, a leading research institution that has published some of the most vital studies connecting gun violence and public health, is facing budget cuts that threaten its ongoing work.
The legacy of redlining, a historic practice that disenfranchised people of color from home ownership and enforced racial segregation, continues to be explored by health experts through the lens of various inequities, including asthma, preterm births, and environmental health. This study is an extension of that effort, examining why the same communities negatively affected by redlining are some of the same communities currently at the highest risk of gun homicide.
The cross-sectional analysis looked at the ways that factors like income, poverty, and health insurance all play a role in the rates of gun violence in communities in Kansas City, Missouri, a city that was once one of the most segregated in the country. Analyzing shootings between 2016 to 2022, the findings show that in communities where the median income was higher, interpersonal firearm violence decreased by 65 percent; in communities where residents were uninsured, interpersonal shootings increased by 3 percent.
The study, by researchers from the University of Kansas Medical Center, suggests a public health approach could significantly reduce violence through access to equitable housing security and healthcare. Actual maps of Kansas City, compared to one of the current health assessment metrics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, support the study's findings.
"Our results further characterize the socioeconomic association of redlining with increased rates of [interpersonal firearm violence]," the authors wrote, recommending continued investigation into understanding the practice of redlining and its relationship to gun crime in the area.
The potential increase in gun violence can often be used as an argument against policies like sentencing alternatives and bail reform. But in New Jersey in 2017, thanks to bipartisan legislation, the state effectively replaced monetary bail with a risk-based system, similar to efforts in Washington, D.C., and Illinois.
Using data from the CDC, along with a robust policy evaluation comparing rates of intimate partner violence before and after bail reform, the researchers found that there was no significant increase in gun violence related to the change in policy. This analysis comes on the heels of recent work that looked at bail reform's effect on firearm violence in all forms and similarly found no significant increase in violence.
"We were motivated to look at fatal violence against women after bail reform to inform active policy debates," said Taylor Riley, a gender equity and health researcher who led the groundbreaking study. "Oftentimes, opponents of cash bail reforms express concern that reducing pretrial detention could lead to increased community violence, with a particular focus and concern on violence against women."
Advocates of bail reform suggest that cash bail disrupts defendants' employment, negatively affects their families' health, and punishes those navigating poverty. This latest research -- the first scientific analysis of interpersonal violence and the effect of New Jersey's policy -- is just the beginning of filling a crucial gap in understanding the interaction of gun violence, prison reform, and public health, explained Jaquelyn Jahn, a social epidemiologist and one of the authors of the study.
"While we show that reducing jail incarceration in New Jersey had no effect on fatal violence against women," said Jahn, "I want to emphasize the urgent need to fund public health solutions that make strides in reducing and preventing intimate partner violence."
In this sweeping review, researchers from The University of Oxford set out to examine the full scope of gun violence research, focusing on the effects of firearm violence on exposed individuals and communities in the United States in the last 25 years. The assessment analyzed studies published after the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting through March 2024, homing in on those that focused on gun violence survivors. The authors aimed to answer the question: "How have researchers conceptualized the harms of firearm violence over the last 25 years?"
The review, which collected studies from seven different databases, highlighted a range of research gaps that deserve further attention. Nearly 27 percent of the 87 studies focused on mass shootings, which represent just a fraction of fatal firearm violence in this country; another 16 percent analyzed the short-term psychological outcomes, while 3 percent were dedicated to cumulative violence, which the authors noted is a research gap that limits the collective understanding of victims of interpersonal violence.
The study discusses the overrepresentation of mass shootings in gun violence scholarship, consistent with other wide-ranging examinations of existing research. Its authors emphasize that research on the enduring impacts of firearm violence, especially on the interpersonal and community level, are "exceptionally limited."