Charlie Bolton: Gun violence no disease

Regarding your June 10 editorial “Rep. Price pushes for studies on gun violence”: Your slam against the NRA for opposing gun violence studies at the Centers for Disease Control was one of the most ridiculous wastes of ink and trees ever. “Disease” refers to disease, not accidents or violence.

The National Safety Council reported in the same issue that drug overdoses and poisoning had surpassed traffic accidents as the main cause of accidental death in America. Accidental shooting deaths, while terribly tragic and preventable, weren’t even mentioned due in part to the many decades of hard work by the NRA and other gun safety organizations.

The hard science (physics, biology and pathology) of gun violence is well understood. The unknown is why so many people have complete disregard for the safety and life of other human beings. This question is better left to the softer social sciences and humanities. One thing we know from the humanities is that people were killing and maiming each other in large relative numbers for several millenia prior to the invention of the gun.

Turning the CDC into a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, while enticing to leftists, would only erode the CDC’s credibility. Though “epidemic” is often used when referring to gun violence, that doesn’t make it a “disease.”

This story was originally published June 18, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Charlie Bolton: Gun violence no disease."