A grant program gives states a path around a 1996 federal rule that prohibits the CDC from advocating gun control — a rule critics say has had a chilling effect on studying who has been shot and how.

The 1996 amendment made access to granular information — things like who is being injured by firearms and the circumstances that caused those injuries — difficult to come by for health officials, policymakers and politicians. It would often take a year or longer to get such statistics as they worked their way from hospitals and through the public health bureaucracy. That has frustrated efforts to address the tens of thousands of gun deaths that occur in the United States each year.

Starting in 2020, however, nine states and the District of Columbia have received money from the CDC to set up pilot programs to speed the dissemination of this data, with the goal of using it for better public health approaches to the problem.