In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, President Obama issued a list of Executive Orders. Notably among them, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was given $10 million to research gun violence.“Year after year, those who oppose even modest gun-safety measures have threatened to defund scientific or medical research into the causes of gun violence, I will direct the Centers for Disease Control to go ahead and study the best ways to reduce it,” Obama said on Jan. 16.
As a result, a 1996 Congressional ban on research by the CDC “to advocate or promote gun control” was lifted. Finally, anti-gun proponents—and presumably the Obama Administration—thought gun owners and the NRA would be met with irrefutable scientific evidence to support why guns make Americans less safe.
Mainstream media outlets praised the order to lift the ban and lambasted the NRA and Congress for having put it in place.
It was the “Executive Order the NRA Should Fear the Most,” according to The Atlantic.
The CDC ban on gun research “caused lasting damage,” reported ABC News.
Salon said the ban was part of the NRA’s “war on gun science.”
And CBS News lamented that the NRA “stymied” CDC research.
Most mainstream journalists argued the NRA’s opposition to CDC gun research demonstrated its fear of being contradicted by science; few—if any—cited why the NRA may have had legitimate concerns. The culture of the CDC at the time could hardly be described as lacking bias on firearms.
“We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes,” Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who oversaw CDC gun research, told The Washington Post in 1994. “Now [smoking] is dirty, deadly and banned.”
Does Rosenberg sound like a man who should be trusted to conduct taxpayer-funded studies on guns?
Rosenberg’s statement coincided with a CDC study by Arthur Kellermann and Donald Reay, who argued guns in the home are 43 times more likely to be used to kill a family member than an intruder. The study had serious flaws; namely, it skewed the ratio by failing to consider defensive uses of firearms in which the intruder wasn’t killed. It has since been refuted by several studies, including one by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, indicating Americans use guns for self-defense 2.5 million times annually. However, the damage had been done—the “43 times” myth is perhaps gun-control advocates’ most commonly cited argument, and a lot of people still believe it to this day.
So, the NRA and Congress took action. But with the ban lifted, what does the CDC’s first major gun research in 17 years reveal? Not exactly what Obama and anti-gun advocates expected. In fact...
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Even though it, mostly, comes out good... it is obvious that there are people in there trying to shoot it down. One huge error was that they couldn't find that shall issue has reduced crime. The only way they might be able to get away with that is by mixing cities who still don't allow, regardless of laws, and mixing those population stats with the counties in the state which do allow gun ownership and carry. This report was very begrudgingly put out, and is still weaker than it should be, and outright wrong on that one are. Still... surprised anything like it was not murdered by bureaucrats and activists which have flooded the government.
ReplyDeleteWhat Doom said, with the addition that when they said, "The report could not conclude whether “passage of right-to-carry laws decrease or increase violence crime.” they're going against John Lott's research and the follow on work done by other statisticians (Lott is an economist). There have been at least 30 studies done to refute Lott, last time I looked into it (back around '10). Not one had concluded that carry laws increased crime.
ReplyDeleteThat makes the CDC report sound less credible.
The media is always going to pick and choose what they want to report. The days of unbiased journalism are long gone. If you want the facts, you need to look beyond the mainstream media and dig deep into sites like this one. Ones whose posts are actual facts and don't mind feedback from opposing viewpoints.
ReplyDelete