Sorry, Bfillmaff, but on this one you are in the wrong. The CDC looks into all kinds of things, not just diseases. The fact that the firearms lobby in the US has gerrymandered a piece of legislation through Congress that SPECIFICALLY PROHIBTS the CDC from examining this one particular aspect of life in the US of A is VERY problematic.
It begs the question, "What are they afraid of?" and I think we ALL know the answer to that.
god dammit you made me google it and I told myself I wouldn't.
from what I read, the CDC admitted openly to being biased and stated clearly that the intent of their research was to get guns banned.
So congress just banned them from doing it. Seems standard now that I look at it.
Those who accuse the NRA, Republicans, and gun advocates of attempting to inject their political bias into federal research on gun crime are not telling the whole story. With the picture complete, we can see that political bias was already present, and the NRA and Congress had acted to remove it.In effect, the CDC was using taxpayer money to inject a biased and false narrative into the American discussion on firearms. It wasn’t doing research, it was creating propaganda.
CDC was being used as a political tool to become the Center for Gun Control, and while there are firearm-related elements the CDC’s expertise would be well-suited for (take the Wilmington report, for instance), the subject of gun crime should not be turned into an epidemiological issue.
Urm . . . some quick reading of google searches disagrees with your comment.
Well over half a million people have died by firearms since 1996, when the ban on gun violence research was enacted, according to a HuffPost calculation of data through 2013 from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to its sponsors, the Dickey Amendment was supposed to tamp down funding for what the National Rifle Association and other critics claimed was anti-gun advocacy research by the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention. In effect, it stopped federal gun violence research almost entirely.
The ban came about after a 1993 study funded by the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention showed homes with firearms were at an increased risk for homicide in the home. After the study came out, the National Rifle Association lobbied to shut down the Center for Injury Prevention altogether. What emerged instead was the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Since researchers weren’t willing to risk their departments funds to test exactly what types of research were and were not permitted under the amendment, gun violence research ground to a halt.
Why Congress stopped gun control activism at the CDC
By Timothy Wheeler, MD
14.3K
15
512
History is not always written by the victors. In a Nov. 20 letter to the Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, House Democrats urged repeal of the 1996 ban on funding for gun control advocacy at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But nowhere does the letter mention the abuse of authority and misuse of tax dollars that prompted Congress to act.
Signed by San Francisco Bay area Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) and several dozen other Democrats, the letter drips faux outrage. Speier claimed in a publicity statement “it’s time to end this ludicrous ban that prevents our nation’s top minds from figuring out how to shield our communities from gun violence.” This audacious and entirely false assertion ignores the mountains of firearm research done since the ban.
Nearly twenty years later, House Democrats seem confident that memories have faded. And media reports on the whole affair have strangely avoided any mention of the CDC’s past wrongdoing. So it’s time once again to set the record straight.I was one of three medical doctors who testified before the House’s Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee on March 6, 1996 about the CDC’s misdeeds. (Note: This testimony and related events are described in my three-part documentedhistorical series). Here is what we showed the committee:
Dr. Arthur Kellermann’s1993 New England Journal of Medicine article that launched his career as a rock star gun control advocate and gave rise to the much-repeated “three times” fallacy. His research was supported by two CDC grants.
Kellermann and his colleagues used the case control method, traditionally an epidemiology research tool, to claim that having a gun in the home triples the risk of becoming a homicide victim. In the article Kellermann admitted that “a majority of the homicides (50.9 percent) occurred in the context of a quarrel or a romantic triangle.” Still another 30 percent “were related to drug dealing” or “occurred during the commission of another felony, such as a robbery, rape, or burglary.”
In summary, the CDC funded a flawed study of crime-prone inner city residents who had been murdered in their homes. The authors then tried to equate this wildly unrepresentative group with typical American gun owners. The committee members were not amused.
The Winter 1993 CDC official publication, Public Health Policy for Preventing Violence, coauthored by CDC official Dr. Mark Rosenberg. This taxpayer-funded gun control polemic offered two strategies for preventing firearm injuries—“restrictive licensing (for example, only police, military, guards, and so on)” and “prohibit gun ownership.”
The brazen public comments of top CDC officials, made at a time when gun prohibitionists were much more candid about their political goals.
“We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” (P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, CDC, quoted in Marsha F. Goldsmith, “Epidemiologists Aim at New Target: Health Risk of Handgun Proliferation,” Journal of the American Medical Association vol. 261 no. 5, February 3, 1989, pp. 675-76.) Dr. O’Carroll later said he had been misquoted.
But his successor Dr. Mark Rosenberg was quoted in the Washington Post as wanting his agency to create a public perception of firearms as “dirty, deadly—and banned.” (William Raspberry, “Sick People With Guns,” Washington Post, October 19, 1994.
CDC Grant #R49/CCR903697-06 to the Trauma Foundation, a San Francisco gun control advocacy group, supporting a newsletter that frankly advocated gun control.
The newsletter advised “advocates” to “organize a picket at gun manufacturing sites” and to “work for campaign finance reform to weaken the gun lobby’s political clout.”
Not surprisingly, the full committee report for the 1997 appropriations bill contained “a limitation to prohibit the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control from engaging in any activities to advocate or promote gun control.” Further, the committee warned CDC officials that it “does not believe that it is the role of the CDC to advocate or promote policies to advance gun control initiatives, or to discourage responsible private gun ownership.”
So contrary to Speier’s tale of great minds shackled and research suppressed, Congress in fact simply directed the CDC to stop promoting gun control. To reasonable minds this is not at all controversial. Congress should ignore the tricksters and continue holding the CDC to its mission of objective research, not pushing for gun control.
Why we can't trust the CDC with gun research
It's not public safety that gun-research advocates really care about. By CHRIS COX 12/09/15 06:01 AM EST
Anti-gun lawmakers have embarked on a national gun control campaign backed by New York City billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Realizing that many of their constituents do not support more gun control, anti-gun advocates in Congress are looking for creative methods to change public opinion. What better way than under the auspices of science?
That is what is behind the renewed call for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funding to “research gun violence.” It’s not objective data gun control advocates seek. They have a pre-determined outcome. Now, they just need some government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded data points to validate their anti-gun agenda.
How do we know this? They’ve done it before. And it’s fair to make the assumption they’ll do it again by simply looking at who is behind these calls – the most rabid anti-gun politicians in the country.
Let’s be clear, the National Rifle Association is not opposed to research that would encourage the safe and responsible use of firearms and reduce the numbers of firearm-related deaths. Safety has been at the core of the NRA’s mission since its inception. But that is not the goal of the gun control advocates who are behind the calls for CDC funding.
Government-funded research was openly biased in the 1990s. CDC officials unabashedly supported gun bans and poured millions of dollars into “research” that was, in fact, advocacy. One of the lead researchers employed in the CDC’s effort was quoted, stating “We’re going to systematically build the case that owning firearms causes deaths.” Another researcher said he envisioned a long-term campaign “to convince Americans that guns are, first and foremost, a public health menace.”
One of the effort’s lead researchers was a prominent attendee at a conference called the Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan (HELP) Network, which was “intended to form a public health model to work toward changing society’s attitudes towards guns so that it becomes socially unacceptable for private citizens to have guns.”
The problem with these conclusions is that they came before the data, which was manipulated to support their agenda. The spin was so egregious that Congress acted and forbade the use of taxpayer funds for such biased, agenda-driven research. Included in the 1996 Omnibus bill was a rider that read, “Provided further, that none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Notice the rider doesn’t oppose funding research. Instead, it forbids funding for research meant to drive the political gun control agenda.
Americans should be able to trust an organization that claims its goal is an unbiased approach to public health. That’s why the gun control agenda they promoted in the 1990s was so offensive, and that’s why the NRA is firmly against allowing the same agency to pursue the same agenda now.
Statistics and data linked to firearm-related violence are complex, and frequently skewed by those who oppose gun ownership. Firearm research generally speaks only to the alleged possible risks associated with gun ownership, never to the benefits that law-abiding gun owners provide to society as a whole. It frequently finds only one option: More gun control, which plenty of respected researchers have found to be ineffective. In fact, the FBI, the nation’s top law enforcement agency, lists 13 contributing factors for why a city or state has a high violent crime rate – and nowhere on that list is weak gun laws.
As distressing as the biased research was, the CDC also omitted or ignored research when findings went against its agenda. For example, a North Carolina study on handgun violence found that the vast majority of fatal handgun crimes were committed by people who had prior felony records and who did not and could not get their firearms by legal means – so they acquired them illegally. Those findings support the NRA’s longstanding position that gun control laws only inhibit law-abiding citizens and do little to nothing to prevent violent crime. However, when the CDC was asked to submit talking points from that research, they refused. And that’s just one example. The CDC routinely rejected data that ran counter to their anti-gun agenda.
This is not what the CDC is supposed to do, nor is it what taxpayers expect from the agency. There is much that can be done to reduce firearm-related deaths, but if we want to find solutions, we have to look at all the facts – including those inconvenient to the gun control agenda.
There is no shortage of biased, privately funded research that contorts the data to support gun control. But research funded by anti-gun billionaires like Michael Bloomberg lacks credibility. The reason anti-gun politicians keep pushing to lift the funding ban is to raise the credibility of biased research with an “official” seal of approval.
If efforts were made to do a stringent, unbiased, and all-inclusive evaluation on which laws actually work when it comes to reducing gun violence, that would be a different story. However, the NRA does not – and will not – support efforts that do nothing but attempt to convince Americans that lawfully owned firearms are a public health menace.
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, you might say Obama’s plan backfired.
Here are some key findings from the CDC report, “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,” released in June: 1. Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker:
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.” 2. Defensive uses of guns are common:
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate thatdefensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.” 3. Mass shootings and accidental firearm deaths account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, and both are declining:
“The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” The report also notes, “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.” 4. “Interventions” (i.e, gun control) such as background checks, so-called assault rifle bans and gun-free zones produce “mixed” results:
“Whether gun restrictions reduce firearm-related violence is an unresolved issue.” The report could not conclude whether “passage of right-to-carry laws decrease or increase violence crime.” 5. Gun buyback/turn-in programs are “ineffective”in reducing crime: “There is empirical evidence that gun turn in programs are ineffective, as noted in the 2005 NRC study Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review. For example, in 2009, an estimated 310 million guns were available to civilians in the United States (Krouse, 2012), but gun buy-back programs typically recover less than 1,000 guns (NRC, 2005). On the local level, buy-backs may increase awareness of firearm violence. However, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, guns recovered in the buy-back were not the same guns as those most often used in homicides and suicides (Kuhn et al., 2002).” 6. Stolen guns and retail/gun show purchases account for very little crime:
“More recent prisoner surveys suggest that stolen guns account for only a small percentage of guns used by convicted criminals. … According to a 1997 survey of inmates, approximately 70 percent of the guns used or possess by criminals at the time of their arrest came from family or friends, drug dealers, street purchases, or the underground market.” 7. The vast majority of gun-related deaths are not homicides, but suicides: “Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.” Why No One Has Heard This Given the CDC’s prior track record on guns, you may be surprised by the extent with which the new research refutes some of the anti-gun movement’s deepest convictions.
What are opponents of the Second Amendment doing about the new data? Perhaps predictably, they’re ignoring it. President Obama, Michael Bloomberg and the Brady Campaign remain silent. Most suspicious of all, the various media outlets that so eagerly anticipated the CDC research are looking the other way as well. One must wonder how media coverage of the CDC report may have differed, had the research more closely fit an anti-gun narrative.
Even worse, the few mainstream journalists who did report the CDC’s findings chose to cherry-pick from the data. Most, like NBC News, reported exclusively on the finding that gun suicides are up. Largely lost in that discussion is the fact that the overall rate of suicide—regardless of whether a gun is involved or not—is also up.
Others seized upon the CDC’s finding that, “The U.S. rate of firearm-related homicide is higher than that of any other industrialized country: 19.5 times higher than the rates in other high-income countries.” However, as noted by the Las VegasGuardian Express, if figures are excluded from such anti-gun bastions as Illinois, California, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., “The homicide rate in the United States would be in line with any other country.”
The CDC report is overall a blow to the Obama Administration’s unconstitutional agenda. It largely supports the Second Amendment, and contradicts common anti-gun arguments. Unfortunately, mainstream media failed to get the story they were hoping for, and their silence on the matter is a screaming illustration of their underlying agenda.
Works fine now. It's an opinion piece from a writer who seems to have a particular bias leading his writing. Nothing points to any flaw in the research done by the CDC, merely a claim that they are inherently anti-gun.
I am anti-broccoli, but that does not mean I am going to advocate that the CDC be prevented from researching how beneficial broccoli might be for my health.
everything being what? raw data that some of the biased cdc studies quoted was already public.... they just choose to manipulate the data to suit their agenda
I'm saying that science, properly conducted, simply looks at data and publishes results. It is the people who look at those results who put their spin on it.
Is it really surprising to note that households containing firearms are more likely to have negative outcomes than those which do not?
everything being what? raw data that some of the biased cdc studies quoted was already public.... they just choose to manipulate the data to suit their agenda
Sent from my SM-G900W8 using Tapatalk
i'm not sure what you are arguing. if what you are saying is true and the CDC made the data public and then manipulated the statistics to suit their agenda and then got caught because the data they used was made public would suggest that a government organization making everything public is the best possible solution. i'm not saying the government is infallible, and obviously statistics can be manipulated, but allowing them to do the research and making it all public is probably the best we can hope for. then we can look at the statistics ourselves and make our own conclusions as well despite what the overall conclusion is from the organization. keeping all the statistics private and just telling us the conclusions is not ideal, nor is denying the government the chance to even research the facts.
i'm not sure what you are arguing. if what you are saying is true and the CDC made the data public and then manipulated the statistics to suit their agenda and then got caught because the data they used was made public would suggest that a government organization making everything public is the best possible solution. i'm not saying the government is infallible, and obviously statistics can be manipulated, but allowing them to do the research and making it all public is probably the best we can hope for. then we can look at the statistics ourselves and make our own conclusions as well despite what the overall conclusion is from the organization. keeping all the statistics private and just telling us the conclusions is not ideal, nor is denying the government the chance to even research the facts.
I simply asked how a government entity would go about producing an unbiased study....
Your reply was to make everything public.
That's not exactly the recipe for producing an unbiased study.
Perhaps, I don't think any government entity can produce an unbiased anything. Unfortunately, politics tends to bias everything any government agency does... from Supreme Court decisions right on down to high school councils.
As far as the CDC gun-related research goes... to simplify... they produced studies that backed their anti-gun agenda... they used data that was made public and got called on using the data incorrectly... and the NRA used this to lobby for the funding to be removed. This is an over simplification... but the premise is there.
I don't think funding bad science and catching the errors later does the public any good. The public doesn't read details... they only read the headlines... "CDC Declares Guns Bad" They aren't going to comprehend the intracacies of mishandling data.
You just have to look at the The FoodBabe and azodicarbonamide to understand that!
Comments
It begs the question, "What are they afraid of?" and I think we ALL know the answer to that.
I'm just saying that I'll assume there is a valid reason for it until I hear otherwise.
from what I read, the CDC admitted openly to being biased and stated clearly that the intent of their research was to get guns banned.
So congress just banned them from doing it. Seems standard now that I look at it.
Sent from my SM-G900W8 using Tapatalk
Well over half a million people have died by firearms since 1996, when the ban on gun violence research was enacted, according to a HuffPost calculation of data through 2013 from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to its sponsors, the Dickey Amendment was supposed to tamp down funding for what the National Rifle Association and other critics claimed was anti-gun advocacy research by the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention. In effect, it stopped federal gun violence research almost entirely.
The ban came about after a 1993 study funded by the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention showed homes with firearms were at an increased risk for homicide in the home. After the study came out, the National Rifle Association lobbied to shut down the Center for Injury Prevention altogether. What emerged instead was the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Since researchers weren’t willing to risk their departments funds to test exactly what types of research were and were not permitted under the amendment, gun violence research ground to a halt.
Link just directs me to their site, not a specific article.
Sent from my SM-G900W8 using Tapatalk
I am anti-broccoli, but that does not mean I am going to advocate that the CDC be prevented from researching how beneficial broccoli might be for my health.
but that's just it - the pro gun articles are all biased, the anti gun articles are all biased... yet the answer lies in the middle most of the time.
Perhaps some government organization should be allowed to conduct research on gun violence so we can have some unbiased information?
Sent from my SM-G900W8 using Tapatalk
make everything public.
Sent from my SM-G900W8 using Tapatalk
link please... [emoji38]
Sent from my SM-G900W8 using Tapatalk
Is it really surprising to note that households containing firearms are more likely to have negative outcomes than those which do not?
i'm not sure what you are arguing. if what you are saying is true and the CDC made the data public and then manipulated the statistics to suit their agenda and then got caught because the data they used was made public would suggest that a government organization making everything public is the best possible solution. i'm not saying the government is infallible, and obviously statistics can be manipulated, but allowing them to do the research and making it all public is probably the best we can hope for. then we can look at the statistics ourselves and make our own conclusions as well despite what the overall conclusion is from the organization. keeping all the statistics private and just telling us the conclusions is not ideal, nor is denying the government the chance to even research the facts.
I simply asked how a government entity would go about producing an unbiased study....
Your reply was to make everything public.
That's not exactly the recipe for producing an unbiased study.
Perhaps, I don't think any government entity can produce an unbiased anything. Unfortunately, politics tends to bias everything any government agency does... from Supreme Court decisions right on down to high school councils.
As far as the CDC gun-related research goes... to simplify... they produced studies that backed their anti-gun agenda... they used data that was made public and got called on using the data incorrectly... and the NRA used this to lobby for the funding to be removed. This is an over simplification... but the premise is there.
I don't think funding bad science and catching the errors later does the public any good. The public doesn't read details... they only read the headlines... "CDC Declares Guns Bad" They aren't going to comprehend the intracacies of mishandling data.
You just have to look at the The FoodBabe and azodicarbonamide to understand that!
Sent from my SM-G900W8 using Tapatalk