State governors, including New Jersey's Phil Murphy and New York's Andrew Cuomo, said obstruction in Washington would be bypassed by tasking their states' top researchers on ways to "reduce the scourge of gun violence."
Since 1996, a federal law — the Dickey Amendment, which was backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) — has blocked federal funding for gun safety research and advocacy, notably via the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Read more: Florida school reopens after massacre [1]
The six-state-plus-Puerto Rico initiative to form the Gun Violence Research Consortium follows a student-led anti-gun campaign[2] that surged nationwide after a high school shooting in February in Parkland, Florida.
Gun advocates cite the US Second Amendment as granting their right to bear arms, including concealed weapons[3].
'Significant new research'
Announcing the consortium's launch on Wednesday, a statement from Murphy's office listed 44 experts, including senior criminologists, physicians and public health researchers — based in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Delaware.
Murphy said the "top researchers" would undertake "significant new research on all manners of gun violence, data collection and analysis across multiple disciplines."
The consortium would also collate "for public use" existing data from institutions, federal and multi-state sources.
'Void' left by federal ban
"This groundbreaking consortium fills the void left by the federal government's 1996 ban on the use of federal funds to study gun violence, which has obstructed research efforts across the nation, including at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health," said Murphy.
Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy described gun violence as a "public health emergency,"
