America’s epidemic of gun violence will persist as long as politicians refuse to thoroughly fund research that is requisite for a sensible cure.
It’s time to demand a bipartisan initiative to fund more national research on gun violence.
Ensuring America is kept in the dark and as far away as possible from getting a handle on the root causes of our gun violence epidemic guarantees that it persists, and possibly grows. This in turn makes the gun lobby’s fear-based narrative easier to maintain— a narrative that keeps guns flying off the shelves and money flying into the NRA leadership and NRA-owned Congressmen’s pockets.
Although it is impossible to prevent every individual act of gun violence, it is absolutely possible to prevent such violence from cascading into the epidemic levels we have so easily acquiesced to in America.
In 2016 alone, there were over 38,000 gun-related deaths, about 11,000 of which were homicides. A 2016 study published in The American Journal of Medicine found the U.S. gun homicide rate was 25 times higher than in other high-income countries. This contributed to an overall U.S. homicide rate that was seven times higher than high-income countries.
While such studies help illustrate the ghastly disparity between the U.S. and other advanced countries’ gun violence rates, the available research is still disparate and lacks a unified whole-of-government approach to what is clearly a national epidemic.
The crucial “why” behind American gun violence is still burdened by a convoluted system of data sets maintained by a variety of federal organizations, nonprofit groups and state and local law enforcement entities.
Although these data sets may capture numbers and rates of gun deaths or injuries, they do little to synthesize the big picture. They fail to show us why America is such an outlier compared to other high-income countries, many of which enjoy many of the exact same movies, video games and music that we do.
In a March interview with Vox’s German Lopez, the head of RAND Corporation’s gun policy initiative, Andrew Morral, described the lack of comprehensive gun violence research as creating “this kind of fact free environment in which people can cherry-pick any study that happens to support what their priors are on the effects of the law.”
The fog that lingers over our understanding of this deadly issue is in large part due to a series of legislative actions taken by Congress in 1996.
Chief among these was the passage of the Dickey Amendment, which originated in response to CDC-funded gun research in the early 1990s. The research found that a gun in the household actually increased the risk of a homicide.
As the findings circulated among the public, the National Rifle Association lost no time pressuring its Congressional pawns to act. Former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) was regarded as the “point man” for the NRA in the 1990s, the man in charge of carrying out the NRA’s will on Capitol Hill. In 1996 he authored the controversial Dickey Amendment, which would effectively stymie future CDC research on gun violence. The vague language used in the amendment stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” This language has remained in some form in every appropriations bill since.
In conjunction with the amendment, Dickey succeeded in pushing Congress to gut the $2.6 million the CDC had been allotted for gun violence research
the previous year.
Taken as a whole, it is easy to see why the CDC would interpret these combined legislative actions to
be a veiled threat.
Congress seemed to be implicitly telling the CDC to back off gun violence research or else.
In a 2016 L.A. Times article, Michael Hiltzik described how fromthat point on, theCDC became wary of researching gun violence unless a green light came from Congress in the form of an explicit appropriation for the research.
While the Dickey Amendment never constituted an official ban on research, it marked the beginning of Congress’s reluctance to provide funds specifically for gun violence research. It’s worth noting that after retiring from Congress, Dickey would later come to regret his amendment and advocated for more gun research.
However, the research-averse climate the amendment created for gun violence hasn’t changed, and likely won’t change as long as the NRA maintains its tight grip on so many U.S. representatives. According to a February analysis conducted by CNN’s Aaron Kessler, more than half of Congress has received money or support from the NRA.
Given that conducting research on gun violence isn’t prohibited by the second Amendment, nor does research infringe on gun rights, we can only conjectureas to what the real reason is the NRA doesn’t want the CDC getting too close to anything that might give America a clearer understanding of our epidemic levels of gun violence.
The average NRA rally or media interview quickly reveals the organization has a skillfully crafted narrative designed to stoke perpetual paranoia and fear, with the goal of persuading Americans that a gun is the only thing standing between them and an imminent death by shadowy predators. There are few if any better advertising pitches that can guarantee steady gun sales for the corporate gun manufacturers that today’s NRA primarily represents.
Using Congress’s power of the purse to keep the nation blind to the gruesome intersection of social ills, mental health and access to firearms seems to be a key element of the gun lobby’s strategy — keep Americans and the media talking in circles among themselves as more and more victims suffer the scourge of gun violence.
The NRA wants and needs America to stay divided on this public health issue. Gun violence breeds a fear that is useful for marketing the sell of even more guns, so why would the NRA or gun manufacturers want to see any sort of reduction in it?
The NRA leverages the sway it holds over Congressional representativesto shoot the very idea of a middle ground to pieces.
Ensuring CDC research on the issue stays inadequately funded and perverting every discussion on gun violence into a political brawl or alleging it is the beginning of a conspiratorial
gun grab are just some of the many ways the NRA and gun lobby achieve this never-ending division.
After every American gun massacre, there are pleas and cries from grief-stricken Americans asking the same disheartening question: “Why does this keep happening?” Congress’s collective answer: “Stay tuned for the next one.”
Answering this terrible “why” requires robust, consistent, comprehensive research into gun violence that has the full bipartisan backing of national legislators who are supposed to be serving the American people, not turning a blind eye to gun violence striking down American adults and children by the thousands.
It is important to point out that clarifying language to the Dickey Amendment was added in this year’s appropriations bill stating, “The Secretary of Health and Human Services has stated the CDC (Centers of Disease Control and Prevention) has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence.”
However, having “the authority to conduct research” is not the same as Congress
actually appropriating funding for this research.
There’s nothing in the current language that says the GOP-led Congress will actually buck their marching orders from the NRA and end the politically motivated ransom games they’ve been playing with the CDC’s funding for gun violence research. Based on Congress’s track record over the past two decades, paving the way for robust research will take far more than a few new phrases buried somewhere in volumes of legislative fine print.
Don’t let Congress keep America in the dark any longer.
Demand Congress fund comprehensive research on gun violence, and use the midterm elections to vote out any politician who lacks the courage to treat gun violence like the public health and safety issue that it is.
The Center for Responsive Politics’ website at http://OpenSecrets. org is an excellent resource for tracking which U.S. representatives have received money from the NRA.
Help pull America out of this confusing fog of cyclical debates by leading the push for more comprehensive gun violence research.
Only when we are armed with knowledge derived from careful research will we begin steering the nation away from senseless bloodshed.
