"If the good guys don't take some risks, the bad guys win."

Dr. Garen Wintemute says he never gets used to telling families that a loved one has died as a result of gun violence. 

"There's no such thing as getting used to it. Every one is as fresh as the first," says Wintemute, an emergency room physician and the Director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. 

That experience of dealing with grieving families led him to his research on gun-violence prevention.  

"For firearms, it's not so much the families we talk to, it's the families we never get a chance to talk to. Most people who die from gunshot wounds die where they're shot. It doesn't matter how fast the ambulance gets there. It doesn't matter how good we are, how good the surgeons are. They're just dead." 

Wintemute ended up spending about a million dollars of his own money to continue his research into gun violence after the U.S. Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which cut off funding for firearm research.

He also visited gun shows to document 'don't ask, don't tell' sales of firearms that take place thanks to the private-sale loophole that allows people to buy guns without background checks. 

"If the good guys don't take some risks, the bad guys win," he tells Dr. Brian Goldman, host of White Coat, Black Art on CBC Radio. 

But he believes despite years of inaction, politicians may finally be ready to make some changes. 

He and his center have just been given US $5M  by the California government to set up the first state-funded firearm violence research center at UC Davis, Sacramento.