What Gun Violence Researchers Would Study If Congress Would Fund Their Efforts

[Judi Lynn]

03/30/2018 05:54 pm ET

Lawmakers have refused to invest in this field of study, leaving gun policy to operate on dogma, not science.

By Erin Schumaker

In the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and continued activism related to gun control, businesses and political groups alike have turned toward active steps they can take to diminish the threat of gun violence. Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart restricted sales to minors, while President Donald Trump and the Justice Department tried to ban bump stocks, the firearms accessory used in the Las Vegas massacre last October.

But the people who study gun violence say these are not proven approaches at reducing the phenomenon. Instead, they would like to see evidence-backed gun policies that are demonstrated to work before they’re passed into law or become corporate policy.

There’s just one problem: That body of research doesn’t exist yet. Because of the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which effectively strangled the field by depriving it of federal funding, there’s only a handful of researchers exploring the most important political issue of 2018.

While large-scale, multi-year studies are expensive, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, believes that in addition to the self-evident benefits of saving American lives, funding gun violence, ownership and rights research are also beneficial from a purely fiscal perspective.

More:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gun-violence-research-topics_us_5aba9618e4b04a59a31222b1

[Igel]

1. The more cynical would say

that Dickey's didn't stop selling guns to prevent violence; it stopped selling guns to avoid bad publicity and garner good publicity. What it said it said out of necessity.

The judgment and sentence we render from our awesome mind-reading abilities depends on how it serves us.

As for the CDC, let's assume there's a new virus that kills people. There are two things we can try to do. We can mitigate symptoms and save lives that way; or we can advance our knowledge of virology by analyzing the virus and figuring out how to prevent its taking hold, whether by vaccine or by antiviral. Long ago it became a sign of high virtue and fidelity to focus on the symptoms in this case or prevent infection, and to be denounce the idea of figuring out causation beyond "the virus is the cause" as heresy. In fact, we don't want that. We know the virtuous path, and, dammit, compliance is required, not understanding.