Monday, February 19, 2018

Why do you let your congressman allow the NRA to hold the entire federal budget hostage in order to gag gun death research, year after year?

(Click to enlarge)
In 1993, a CDC study reported that residents in homes with a gun faced a 2.7-fold greater risk of homicide and a 4.8-fold greater risk of suicide.
     The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine noted that people living in those homes did not gain the protection they sought.
     The National Rifle Association found the study's conclusions inconvenient, so it moved to suppress their dissemination and got its errand boys and girls in Congress to cut CDC's funding by the amount the study had cost — to intimidate the CDC and researchers.
     But the NRA didn't stop there.
     It also had its congressional representatives add language to the Omnibus spending bill for 1997, directing that “none of the funds … at the [CDC] may be used to advocate or promote gun control.
     This was called the Dickey amendment after Jay Dickey, an Arkansas GOP congressman who introduced it. It has been included in every omnibus appropriations bill since 1997.
     In 2011, Republicans added a Dickey clause to appropriations to the National Institutes of Health funding for 2012.
Click to enlarge and sharpen
     Years later, Dickey (now deceased) had second thoughts. In a joint op-ed in the Washington Post with Mark Rosenberg, who worked on the CDC study which angered the NRA, the two wrote,  “Since the legislation passed in 1996, the United States has spent about $240 million a year on traffic safety research, but there has been almost no publicly funded research on firearm injuries. As a consequence, U.S. scientists cannot answer the most basic question: What works to prevent firearm injuries?”


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