As on point today as it was when posted over 6 1/2 years ago.
Why we can’t trust the CDC with gun research
It’s not public safety that gun-research advocates really care about.
Anti-gun lawmakers have embarked on a national gun control campaign backed by New York City billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Realizing that many of their constituents do not support more gun control, anti-gun advocates in Congress are looking for creative methods to change public opinion. What better way than under the auspices of science?
That is what is behind the renewed call for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funding to “research gun violence.” It’s not objective data gun control advocates seek. They have a pre-determined outcome. Now, they just need some government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded data points to validate their anti-gun agenda.
How do we know this? They’ve done it before. And it’s fair to make the assumption they’ll do it again by simply looking at who is behind these calls – the most rabid anti-gun politicians in the country.
Let’s be clear, the National Rifle Association is not opposed to research that would encourage the safe and responsible use of firearms and reduce the numbers of firearm-related deaths. Safety has been at the core of the NRA’s mission since its inception. But that is not the goal of the gun control advocates who are behind the calls for CDC funding.
Government-funded research was openly biased in the 1990s. CDC officials unabashedly supported gun bans and poured millions of dollars into “research” that was, in fact, advocacy. One of the lead researchers employed in the CDC’s effort was quoted, stating “We’re going to systematically build the case that owning firearms causes deaths.” Another researcher said he envisioned a long-term campaign “to convince Americans that guns are, first and foremost, a public health menace.”
One of the effort’s lead researchers was a prominent attendee at a conference called the Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan (HELP) Network, which was “intended to form a public health model to work toward changing society’s attitudes towards guns so that it becomes socially unacceptable for private citizens to have guns.”
The problem with these conclusions is that they came before the data, which was manipulated to support their agenda. The spin was so egregious that Congress acted and forbade the use of taxpayer funds for such biased, agenda-driven research. Included in the 1996 Omnibus bill was a rider that read, “Provided further, that none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Notice the rider doesn’t oppose funding research. Instead, it forbids funding for research meant to drive the political gun control agenda.
Americans should be able to trust an organization that claims its goal is an unbiased approach to public health. That’s why the gun control agenda they promoted in the 1990s was so offensive, and that’s why the NRA is firmly against allowing the same agency to pursue the same agenda now.
Statistics and data linked to firearm-related violence are complex, and frequently skewed by those who oppose gun ownership. Firearm research generally speaks only to the alleged possible risks associated with gun ownership, never to the benefits that law-abiding gun owners provide to society as a whole. It frequently finds only one option: More gun control, which plenty of respected researchers have found to be ineffective. In fact, the FBI, the nation’s top law enforcement agency, lists 13 contributing factors for why a city or state has a high violent crime rate – and nowhere on that list is weak gun laws.
As distressing as the biased research was, the CDC also omitted or ignored research when findings went against its agenda. For example, a North Carolina study on handgun violence found that the vast majority of fatal handgun crimes were committed by people who had prior felony records and who did not and could not get their firearms by legal means – so they acquired them illegally. Those findings support the NRA’s longstanding position that gun control laws only inhibit law-abiding citizens and do little to nothing to prevent violent crime. However, when the CDC was asked to submit talking points from that research, they refused. And that’s just one example. The CDC routinely rejected data that ran counter to their anti-gun agenda.
This is not what the CDC is supposed to do, nor is it what taxpayers expect from the agency. There is much that can be done to reduce firearm-related deaths, but if we want to find solutions, we have to look at all the facts – including those inconvenient to the gun control agenda.
There is no shortage of biased, privately funded research that contorts the data to support gun control. But research funded by anti-gun billionaires like Michael Bloomberg lacks credibility. The reason anti-gun politicians keep pushing to lift the funding ban is to raise the credibility of biased research with an “official” seal of approval.
If efforts were made to do a stringent, unbiased, and all-inclusive evaluation on which laws actually work when it comes to reducing gun violence, that would be a different story. However, the NRA does not – and will not – support efforts that do nothing but attempt to convince Americans that lawfully owned firearms are a public health menace.