A popular narrative in the U.S. gun debate concerns federal funding of gun research: Because of a right-wing backlash against gun-related public health research (centered on the controversial Kellermann et al. study), federal funding of gun research has been frozen since the mid-1990s. How accurate is this popular “funding freeze” narrative—or is the federal funding of gun research better described as a “chill”? If the latter, what kinds of funding have persisted within this “chill”? Drawing on public data on funded project abstracts from 1996 to 2016 from three major federal institutes (the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health), this paper shows that despite funding cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), federal funding for gun research has continued, especially for studies that construct the focus of their study as gun crime. Specifically, we find that a criminal justice approach to the study of guns and gun-related topics dominates the project abstracts analyzed and that this approach also casts a shadow on other approaches—especially public health and social justice approaches—to the research of guns. Examining federally funded gun research from a social constructionist lens provides insight not just into federal funding of gun research but also into the dominant framings of gun policy within the United States: criminal justice approaches to gun research may reinforce an understanding of gun violence as a problem of crime and justify criminalizing strategies in gun policy.

在美国枪支辩论中，一个流行的叙述涉及联邦政府对枪支研究的资助：由于右翼反对与枪支有关的公共卫生研究（以有争议的Kellermann等人的研究为中心），自此以来，联邦政府对枪支研究的资助被冻结了。 1990年代中期。这种流行的“资金冻结”叙述有多准确？或者说，联邦对枪支研究的资助可以更好地形容为“寒意”？如果是后者，在这种“寒蝉”中持续存在哪些资金？本文利用1996年至2016年来自三个主要联邦机构（美国国立司法研究所，美国国家科学基金会和美国国立卫生研究院）的资助项目摘要的公共数据，该论文显示，尽管削减了疾病控制中心的资金和预防（CDC），联邦继续为枪支研究提供资金，犯罪。具体而言，我们发现，对枪支和枪支相关主题进行研究的刑事司法方法在所分析的项目摘要中占主导地位，并且该方法还对枪支研究的其他方法（尤其是公共卫生和社会正义方法）投下了阴影。从社会建构主义者的角度审视联邦资助的枪支研究不仅可以洞悉联邦政府对枪支研究的资助，还可以洞悉美国境内枪支政策的主要框架：刑事司法对枪支研究的方法可能会加深对枪支暴力问题的理解犯罪并为枪支政策中的定罪策略辩护。