While gun research has been conducted throughout this nation for years and years, there’s been this idea that such research has been stymied by the fact that federal law places restrictions on what the Centers for Disease Control can use money for when it comes to guns.
As a result, the CDC has argued they were legally barred from conducting gun violence research due to federal law.
Monday, Congress apparently made a couple of changes.
Federal agencies will receive $25 million from Congress to study gun violence in a government spending deal reached by House and Senate negotiators — a major win for Democrats who have long pushed for dedicated funding to research the issue, a source told The Hill.
“Democrats have broken the ban on funding for the first time in decades,” the source said.
The deal includes $12.5 million each for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health to study gun violence and ways to prevent it.
It’s the first time in more than 20 years that Congress has appropriated money for gun violence research.
“Taking action should never have taken more than 20 years,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who helped secure the funding.
The problem is, there was really nothing to stop the CDC from conducting research. They didn’t need special permission to look into firearm-related violence.
You see, the law in question–the Dickey Amendment–didn’t prevent gun research. It prevented tax dollars from being used on anti-gun research. In other words, the only thing it prevented was biased “research.” Efforts to look for the cause of inner-city violence, for example, would have been more than fine.
What happened, though, is that the powers that be at the CDC apparently let their own biases show by deciding that gun-violence research was inherently gun control research. To be fair, they were probably right, but only because they weren’t interested in science. They and their researchers were interested in pushing an agenda and little else.
The CDC could have spent the last 25 years looking into the causes of violence. They could have spent time trying to determine just what factors go into creating a violent criminal, all so policymakers could try and address those causes. Hell, they could have done a million different things.
They didn’t.
Instead, they did nothing and pretending it was someone else’s fault.
Now they’re going to get some money for some research and I already know what they’ll find. They’ll argue that somehow gun control is needed, even though we have mountains of data already showing that gun control doesn’t work. None of that will matter, of course. It won’t matter because the CDC has never really cared about ending violence.
At the end of the day, the CDC is only interested in one thing and that’s pushing an anti-gun agenda that would see our ability to defend ourselves severely limited, despite the fact that their own research found that millions of lives are saved by guns.
Folks at the CDC are using their jobs and taxpayer money to push their own personal ideologies, something the Dickey Amendment sought to put an end to. Looks like we’re going to get to see it all over again.
But at the end of the day, nothing stopped the CDC from researching violence, it just stopped them from shilling for gun control groups. So really, this new funding shouldn’t be news.
It only is because of the CDC’s dishonesty.
