WASHINGTON — A panel of experts convened in response to the school shooting last year in Newtown, Conn., gave the federal government an ambitious set of priorities on Wednesday for research on guns, ending what experts said has been a 17-year hiatus in the study of gun violence after Congress took away federal money for the topic in the 1990s.

President Obama has included $10 million for gun-related research in his 2014 budget, the first federal financing for the topic in years, and the panel’s chairman, Alan I. Leshner, said the report was a first step to deepen evidence about the public health implications of guns. The panel was assembled by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council at President Obama’s request.

“Policies are made on the basis of facts and values, and we are the facts people,” said Mr. Leshner, who is the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We are trying to provide a tool for the country to address this very difficult issue more productively than it has been able to do in the past.”

Among the panel’s recommendations was a call for better data on guns. For example, there is no national count of how many guns there are in the country. And while federal law enforcement authorities, like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, gather data on specific guns, they track only those used in crimes, and often the details are not accessible to researchers. One database, the National Violent Death Reporting System, which compiles information on deaths from police departments and medical examiners’ offices, covers only about a third of the states.