The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be free to do research on the impact of guns on health, President Barack Obama said on Wednesday when he announced a comprehensive set of recommendations for stemming shooting-related deaths and injuries.

CDC researchers have collected statistics on firearm-related deaths but have been barred from conducting in-depth studies since 1996, when then-Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark., led the drive to strip the agency’s budget of $2.6 million, the amount spent that year on research into guns. Dickey also successfully inserted report language into the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that said: “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.” Since then, that prohibition has been renewed annually in spending bills.

Federal officials, concerned about the political ramifications, interpreted the language as a signal to steer away from doing the kind of research that the CDC used to provide. One of the articles that drew protests from the National Rifle Association was a New England Journal of Medicine study that found that people who lived in homes with a gun were nearly three times as likely to die of a homicide and nearly five times as likely to die of suicide than people without guns.

Obama said Wednesday that his lawyers have assured him that such research does not amount to advocacy or promotion, and he signed a presidential memo directing the CDC, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies to conduct it. A senior administration official said that the CDC will begin work immediately on research exploring the causes and prevention of gun violence, and that the White House will propose in its fiscal 2014 budget request that Congress provide $10 million for the CDC to support that research, including investigating whether there is a link between shootings and violent video games or other media.

The administration also will seek an additional $20 million to expand the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System, which was created in 2002 to collect de-identified data from 18 states on gun-related deaths, including the type of gun used and how it was stored. The information is gleaned from death certificates, police reports and coroner or medical examiner reports.

Dickey has since repudiated the idea that federally funded researchers should not investigate gun-related deaths. In an opinion piece in The Washington Post last year, Dickey and former director of the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control Mark Rosenberg wrote: “It’s vital to understand why we know more and spend so much more on preventing traffic fatalities than on preventing gun violence, even though firearm deaths (31,347 in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available) approximate the number of motor vehicle deaths (32,885 in 2010).”

In an interview Wednesday, Rosenberg said he expected researchers to begin working with data from such departments as Justice and Education. They will try to answer questions about what raises the risks of dying from gun violence. He called Obama’s proposal “a very important start,” likening it to the planting of a tree that requires many years to grow. “The best time to begin was 20 years ago, but the second best time is now,” he said.

“When the NRA threatened the science, they scared researchers away from this field, so today we don’t know what works,” Rosenberg added.

Also on Wednesday. Democratic Reps. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Carolyn B. Maloney of New York said that they and 31 cosponsors would introduce legislation to codify the president’s executive order and end what Markey called “an irrational and counterproductive ban.”

The push by the White House to pursue gun-related research is part of a detailed, four-part plan that includes proposals to reduce problems tied to mental illness. (See related story, CQ News, Jan. 16, 2013).

The proposal also clarified that no federal law in any way prohibits doctors or other health care providers from reporting their patients’ threats of violence to the authorities, or talking to patients about gun safety.

CDC National Violent Death Reporting System

By Rebecca Adams, CQ HealthBeat Associate Editor, Rebecca Adams can be reached at radams@cq.com.