Searching for answers

Trent Brewer and Beatriz Cintora-Silva were part of a fairly typical pattern of homicides in December 2012, the same month as the Newtown mass murders.

Exactly how many others across the United States met the same fate that month?

There's really no way to know. That's because of a lack of data. The FBI details homicides each year but it often has a lag time in reporting and does not specify the exact type of weapon. While the CDC has a National Violent Death Reporting System to collect data for violence prevention research, it is only operational in 18 states.

A slew of researchers, professors and experts successfully urged Vice President Joe Biden to include researching gun violence as one of the proposals he submitted to the president. Biden led the gun violence task force created by Obama in the wake of last month's Newtown shootings.

Harold Pollack, co-director of the Chicago Crime Lab and one of the researchers who penned the recommendations to Biden, said he hopes this federal action will reverse the stifling of research and data since the 1990s.

That's when the powerful pro-gun National Rifle Association effectively ended federal funding for gun violence research, citing its opposition to taxpayer-funded studies on gun violence.

That type of research is exactly what Pollack said can eventually prevent some of the senseless deaths as a result of guns.

"If you look at 'How did someone get that gun that led to that person getting killed?' we might be able to find ways to have interfered with it," Pollack said. "Maybe it's related to the gun dealer, maybe it's a type of gun commerce that we can interrupt, or maybe there's a social service intervention before any of that."

He noted that studies of infant deaths and car accidents led to decreased rates of deaths in both cases.

Traffic accident research led to the discovery that many deaths were the result of impacts inside the car, not the car hitting a tree, for example.

That, Pollack said, is why we have airbags and seat belts. Those lifesaving additions to cars were a direct result of the tedious research.

That is how guns should be addressed, he said.

"We have to be able to use the tools that we have ... to try and make sensible policy," Pollack said. "If our data about critical matters is left in a dusty box of a basement in a courthouse, there isn't a whole lot we can do."

Obama has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies to immediately begin research on gun violence, its impact and any prevention measures.

There is only one hurdle standing in the way: Congress has to give them funding.

Tracing gun sales

It can takes weeks or even months, if law enforcement is lucky, to trace a gun back to its origin.

Because many states don't require guns to be registered, or private sales to be documented, no one really knows who owns many of the guns in circulation in the United States.

That means authorities are often unable to find out how criminals got their guns.