~a column by Colleen O’Brien
That there is a link between gun possession and gun assault sounds like a no-brainer of a thought.
Without the gun, there would be no gun assault.
In one of the many articles in the newspaper about the San Bernardino killings, I read this one part of a sentence: ” . . . the freeze on federal funds for gun violence research, which has now spanned nearly two decades. . . .” It froze me.
In 1993, a research article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine about the risk of death in the home because of gun ownership. The researchers had been funded by grant money from the Centers for Disease Control.
The journal article went out on the wires — news of the day — and the National Rifle Association perked right up. Soon, they had whipped up a campaign for the elimination of the center (a part of the CDC called the National Center for Injury Prevention) using its money to study gun violence. By 1996, Congress wrote in the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 1997 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.”
Besides the 32,000 run-of-the-mill gun deaths a year in the U.S., this means that not even the movie house attack in Aurora, CO, in July of 2012; the gun attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, in 2012; the UC Santa Barbara shooting deaths in May of 2014; the Nov. 27 Planned Parenthood attack in Colorado Springs; and the Dec. 2 San Bernardino deaths by gun attack last week . . . no tax money can be used to study how to stop any of it.
This is a federal law.
Guess who authored it, influenced some congressman to front it and got it passed late one night as a rider on another bill?
National Rifle Association.
The original research article in a medical journal concluded that guns in the home don’t protect us. Far from it. They result in an increase in homicide and accidental deaths, mostly of children.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012 repeated “None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control” and continues the original bill of 1996.
Our lawmakers are falling all over themselves to protect us from ISIS or “dangerous” immigrants; they are willing to close our country tight as a drum. Which leave us to the wing nuts with guns who stroll into our grade schools, movie theaters, colleges, clinics, social justice centers and who knows where next, and start shooting.
Why won’t Congress pay for research into something that might teach us how to prevent this?
If anyone really thinks the NRA is out there protecting our Second Amendment rights, read your history. They’re interested in protecting their source of wealth. Their old line that “guns don’t kill people, people do” is specious at best. It’s like saying “knives don’t peel potatoes, people do.”
The NRA has a lot to answer for; as do all the people who have bought into their scare tactics of losing our “rights.” The question of whose rights are infringed upon has a clear answer: all those innocent dead kids and moms and dads and lovers and friends who bite the bullet.
*from Conservative Answers to the Gun Control Debate
