To stem gun violence, allow the federal study of it

While the nation debates guns in schools, Congress should approve going back to school on guns. It's time to learn more about the roots and pattens of gun violence in America.

That means repealing the Dickey Amendment. The 1996 provision technically bars the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from advocating for gun control, but its practical effect has been to stop the CDC and other federal agencies from conducting deep research into a major public health hazard.

U.S. Rep David Price, a Democrat from Chapel Hill, is the Vice Chair on the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and a leading advocate for restoring federal research into gun violence. Price and other representatives wrote to House Speaker Paul Ryan a week after the Parkland, Fla., school shooting to ask that he allow debate and a vote on legislation to repeal the Dickey Amendment and provide adequate funding to the CDC to research gun violence.

"In the wake of the tragic Parkland, Fla., school killings, there appears to be an opening to finally rescind this unwarranted and detrimental impediment on federally funded research and once again conduct research that could save lives," Price and the other representatives wrote.

Ryan has said "more facts and data" are needed on gun violence, but he has not yet responded to the request for debate on the amendment that blocks the accumulation and analysis of such facts and data.

In the 22 years since passage of the Dickey Amendment, there have been 600,000 gunshot victims. Each case has a story, but the nation knows very little about the story all the cases tell. We need to know more about such issues as guns and domestic violence, how access to guns affects suicide rates, how to prevent accidental shootings and gun thefts and what measures work best to reduce gun crimes.

Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine who in July started the Firearm Violence Research Center at the University of California, Davis with state funding, said in a recent New York Times report: “We have repeatedly and consciously turned our back on the problem. How many thousands of people are dead today who might have been alive if that research effort had been put in place and we had answered critical questions and set prevention measures in motion?”

The reason we don't know more is the same reason Congress has not done more to reduce gun violence — pressure from the National Rifle Association.

In a report last week, The New York Times asked Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the NRA, whether the group continues to support the Dickey Amendment. “We oppose taxpayer dollars being spent to advocate for gun control,” she said. Asked what gun research the NRA would support, Baker said the group would like to see a study of how often firearms are used in self-defense.

Congress ought to take the NRA up on that request because the gun-right organization would not be happy with the results. No doubt people defend themselves with guns against genuine threats, but that number is a tiny fraction of those who shoot themselves, accidentally or mistakenly shoot others or kill others in the course of arguments, robberies or rampages.

Guns are powerful things, but knowledge is powerful, too. If the nation could be free to learn more about gun violence, it could be on the way to having less of it.

This story was originally published March 16, 2018 at 6:52 PM with the headline "To stem gun violence, allow the federal study of it."