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The proud know-nothings of the NRA and in the Republican party insist that nothing could work to stop gun violence (the bad guy with the gun) while they prop up the industry, flooding our streets with machines of mass destruction. Because, they say, experience proves nothing will work. Because, they say, it will just keep happening. Meanwhile, for the past 22 years, they've throttled any and all public policy research into what might actually prevent our children from being slaughtered with guns.
Dr. Mark L. Rosenberg, current president emeritus of the Task Force for Global Health in Decatur, was the first director of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and he has some thoughts on this.
The exact causes of America’s rise in mass shootings—and the best ways to prevent such violence—remain uncertain all these years after Columbine. Should we focus our efforts on mental health? Would a ban on semi-automatic rifles necessarily solve the problem? What if the surest bet is for schools to install metal detectors in their halls? To those of us in the public health community, the path forward is clear: To solve this nationwide crisis of firearm injuries and deaths, we must pursue the same kind of scientific research that showed us how to save millions of lives from cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure. The same type of scientific research that helped us save half a million lives from road traffic crashes, without banning cars. The same kind of scientific research that proved that second-hand smoke harms people. Common sense doesn’t tell us whether a ban on semi-automatic rifles will reduce mass shootings—that question is too complicated for us to simply work out in our heads. But it’s possible a well-designed study could, and would in turn build public trust in any resulting legislation.
The problem is that scientists don’t have the resources to do the research we so urgently need.
We used to be able to conduct such work. In the 1980s, researchers at the CDC began a program to find out how to prevent gun violence. But in 1996, Congress, with prodding from the NRA, stepped in. That year, the House and Senate passed the so-called Dickey amendment, which declared that none of the federal funds for the CDC’s injury center could be used "to promote or advocate gun control." The amendment did not explicitly prohibit the CDC from conducting gun violence research; it prohibited the CDC (and later, other federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health) from lobbying for gun control legislation. Nevertheless, the provision was a shot across the bow and had a chilling effect.
A second shot was Congress’ taking away the $2.6 million that the CDC’s injury center had been spending annually to support gun violence research. The third shot was fired by CDC itself, when the agency director fired the person most closely identified with the gun violence prevention research. (That person was me.) Soon, the CDC’s research effort was reduced by more than 90 percent.
And now, he writes, the CDC leadership has all but given up the fight, "willing to let this eminently solvable problem fester, seemingly because they fear the NRA will prod Congress to cut public health programs that are viewed as more central and critical to CDC’s mission—fighting infectious diseases like Ebola or influenza and chronic diseases like heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and stroke." They won't go to Congress to plead for funding into the third-leading cause of death in children because they could be punished and lose the funding for their core job. Because that's how beholden to the NRA Congress has become.
He also makes the point that to make good public policy, you've got to support effective public policy research. Even the original sponsor of that amendment that got the ball rolling on stripping research funding, former Arkansas Rep. Jay Dickey has reconsidered that ban, saying in 2015 "I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time. […] I have regrets."
His regrets don't mean a lot in the face of thousands of murdered innocents, and they mean even less to the current members of Congress. Hell, even after one of their own was shot last year, they did nothing. So in thrall are they to the NRA, the guy who got shot—Rep. Steve Scalise—says he came out of the experience with a "fortified" commitment to fighting gun control.
The only way this ends is to get those people out of power.