Congress continues to cower before the nation’s powerful gun lobby, which has gagged even research and debate. It’s bad enough that lawmakers failed to enact the most basic safety measures, such as comprehensive background checks, after one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history left 26 people, including 20 children, dead in Newtown, Conn., more than two years ago.
But the National Rifle Association and its cohorts have done more than stymie legislation. They have paralyzed researchers and inhibited the free flow of ideas and information that policy makers and citizens need to make informed decisions in this contentious and emotional debate. That should trouble all Americans, regardless of their views on regulating firearms.
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In chilling scientific debate, the gun lobby has subordinated the nation’s health interests to its narrow agenda. Congress can help by not blocking funding for such research by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Without dedicated funding for firearms research, the CDC has avoided examining gun violence as a public health issue. In 1996, the NRA accused the federal agency of pushing gun control, and its lapdogs in Congress threatened to strip the agency’s funding. Lawmakers inserted language into the CDC’s appropriations bill that barred the use of funding for advocacy of gun control.
That’s a vague directive, but the CDC got the message. So did funding sources and researchers around the country. The Washington Post reports that gun-related studies conducted by the National Institute of Justice or funded by private nonprofit groups has practically dried up in the past five years. For researchers, studying guns has become a career-killer and a dry well for grant funding.
After the Newtown massacre in December, 2012, President Obama told the CDC to resume studying the causes of gun violence. Ending the research ban had broad support among the nation’s scientists, who rightly worried that the country was ignoring a serious public health problem. Despite a lifting of the research ban, however, the CDC continues to sit on the sidelines of an important national debate.
Neither members of Congress nor the public should support publicly funded research that’s driven by explicit policy agendas, including gun control. The role of researchers is to analyze information and go where the data take them.
Yet chilling agencies from even looking at a subject is noxious. It’s tantamount to not asking questions because you don’t want to hear the answers.
Gun violence, including its use in suicides and domestic and youth conflict, is indisputably a serious public health problem. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the nation’s top public health official, calls U.S. rates of gun violence a public health threat. The CDC Web site cites violence as a serious public health problem.
Gun violence, like the Ebola virus, requires research to determine causes, as well as potential control and prevention measures. After they get such information, elected officials and citizens can then decide whether they support proposed remedies.
The gun lobby is not invincible. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has rebuffed the NRA by vetoing a gun measure that would have placed women in domestic abuse cases further at risk. Standing up to the gun lobby on the issue of basic research is also important.
CDC administrators must stop letting the gun lobby push them around. But fixing the problem will require more than researchers with integrity and a straight spine. It will require funding sources, including the federal government, who also refuse to subordinate the nation’s public health interests to the self-serving agenda of the NRA.
First Published January 27, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
