For years, the Dickey Amendment was held up as the reason why federal tax dollars couldn't be used to fund gun research. Strangely, plenty of it still happened, but it wasn't funded by the feds.

Then things changed and suddenly, the Dickey Amendment wasn't a thing anymore, at least as it applied to research on violent crime.

The issue now, though, is that the Trump administration isn't exactly winning friends and influencing people among the gun research community, and as David Codrea notes over at Ammoland, they kind of brought it on themselves.

The subjective hyperbole continues in The Trace’s article:

For decades, researchers, physicians, and epidemiologists were stymied in their efforts to study gun violence as a public health issue, a link that was first made in the late 1970s. The CDC began funding gun violence research in the 1990s, as the rates of firearm homicide and suicide spiked, but lobbying by the National Rifle Association led to the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which effectively halted federal dollars for the research. It wasn’t until 2019 that Congress struck a bipartisan deal jointly awarding the NIH and CDC an annual $25 million to study gun violence. [“Bipartisan”—thanks, “Republicans”!]

But that’s the narrative that dominates the search engines, that the powerful obstructionist NRA stopped “gun violence research,” and readers using Google to search will be hard pressed to find that’s not a true representation: The amendment didn‘t stop research, it merely precluded the use of CDC funds for gun control advocacy:

“None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.”

Exactly. That's the text itself, and the fact that the CDC interpreted that to mean that gun research was forbidden is telling, but it's not saying a thing about the legislation itself.

Instead, this is a case of malicious compliance. This is stopping something that actually isn't forbidden and pretending that it's the law they don't like keeping them from doing it.

It's not unlike how the Air Force recently tried to stop teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen simply because DEI was prohibited by the Trump administration. Teaching basic history isn't and wasn't the same thing as DEI, they just tried to present it as if it were so they could make the legislation "hurt" as much as possible.

Sort of like how Obama shut down open-air, unmanned monuments during the government shutdown.

Anyway moving on...

What The Trace is not telling its readers is why that was necessary.

Regular readers should recall “retired neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, medical editor and author, medical historian and medical ethicist, public health critic and advocate for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D.  In his landmark “The Perversion of Science and Medicine (Part III): Public Health and Gun Control Research,” he documented how the government was casting objectivity aside and abusing its authorized purposes with naked political agenda promotion masked as “science”:

Dr. Mark Rosenberg, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention (NCIPC) in 1994 told The Washington Post: “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. Now it [sic] is dirty, deadly, and banned.”

See, researchers such as Rosenberg, are using their professional positions to push an agenda. What's more, they're not exactly clever about it.

We know that the research that did take place without federal funding was so ridiculously biased as to be useless. 

And nothing has changed. Most of the research we see is heavily slanted toward the anti-gun side of the debate, and when a researcher actually publishes something that suggests otherwise, whoever it is gets attacked in an attempt to discredit them professionally, all while ignoring the problematic methodology in all the research they celebrate.

As they're looking at another end to federal funding, they have to remember that they brought it all on themselves. They could have just done unbiased research and probably have been left alone. They didn't.

So I'm sorry, but I'm not shedding a single tear for them.

I might hurt something laughing at them, though.