❝ Rebecca Cunningham of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor became acquainted with guns at a tender age: When she was 5 years old, her mother kicked out her violent husband, who had beaten her and threatened to kill her. And she bought a gun.
❝ Today, Cunningham, who once watched her mother tuck that pistol in her purse as she headed to the shooting range, is directing the largest gun research grant that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded in at least 30 years. With $4.9 million from NIH’s child health institute and a team of 27 researchers at 12 institutions, she is on a mission to jump-start gun injury research on a population as vulnerable as she once was: U.S. children and teenagers, for whom guns are the second-leading cause of death.
As a hunter [in younger years] and gun owner with ethical concerns, I have to endorse this sort of research. The cynic in me still says cowardly politicians have no interest in the popular will of Americans vis-a-vis guns and gun control – but, it’s always worth extending our knowledge and continuing the fight.
Eideard 
(CNN): Fewer Americans are likely to own a gun now than 40 years ago, but those who do are more likely to own handguns over rifles or shotguns. As the proportion of those with handguns has increased, so has the number of children under the age of 5 who are dying from firearm injuries, according to a new study. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/28/health/handguns-child-deaths-study/index.html “We are concerned that children are dying from preventable reasons and wanted to study ways to keep this from happening,” said Kate Prickett, a family sociologist and demographer at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and lead author of the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. (Note: “The authors said they did not have enough data to make reliable conclusions on the trend for African-American families, in whom the rates of child mortality after firearm injuries are typically higher despite lower rates of gun ownership.”)
Children’s National Medical Center “A ‘compelling call’ for pediatricians to discuss firearm safety” https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-compelling-pediatricians-discuss-firearm-safety.html