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| US President Barack Obama (C) signs executive orders with Vice President Joe Biden (L) and invited guests during an event unveiling a package of proposals to reduce gun violence at the White House in Washington, DC, January 16, 2013. Obama signed 23 executive orders to curb gun violence and demanded Congress pass as assault weapons ban, in a sweeping set of measures in response to the Newtown massacre. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife) |
Labeling his not-so-concealed gun control weapon as science, Obama took aim at the NRA and their inconvenient gun-totin’ ilk, declaring: “While year after year, those who oppose even modest gun-safety measures have threatened to defund scientific or medical research into the causes of gun violence, I will direct the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to go ahead and study the best ways to reduce it.”
Perhaps the president has forgotten that the CDC has previously been funded, then later defunded, regarding medical research for gun violence. His directive, if funded again by Congress, would end a virtual 17 year ban which stipulates, quite appropriately, that none of CDC’s federal financing can be used to advocate or promote gun control…exactly what CDC was originally doing.
In 1996, the Congress axed $2.6 million allocated for gun research from the CDC out of its $2.2 billion budget, charging that its studies were being driven by anti-gun prejudice. While that funding was later reinstated, it was re-designated for medical research on traumatic brain injuries.
There was a very good reason for the gun violence research funding ban. Virtually all of the scores of CDC-funded firearms studies conducted since 1985 had reached conclusions favoring stricter gun control. This should have come as no surprise, given that ever since 1979, the official goal of the CDC’s parent agency, the U.S. Public Health Service, had been “…to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership”, starting with a 25% reduction by the turn of the century.”
Ten senators who strongly supported the CDC gun research funding ban put their reasons in writing: “This research is designed to, and is used to, promote a campaign to reduce lawful firearms ownership in America…Funding redundant research initiatives, particularly those which are driven by a social-policy agenda, simply does not make sense.”
Sociologist David Bordura and epidemiologist David Cowan characterized the public health literature on guns at that time as “advocacy based upon political beliefs rather than scientific fact”. Noting that The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association were the main outlets for CDC-funded studies of firearms, they observed that “reports” with findings not advocating strict gun control were rarely cited. Bordura and Cowan found that “little is cited from the criminological or sociological field”, and also that the articles that are cited “are almost always by medical or public health researchers.”
All too often, they witnessed that “assumptions are presented as fact:”… that there is a causal association between gun ownership and risk of violence, that this association is consistent across all demographic categories, and that additional legislation will reduce the prevalence of firearms and consequently reduce the incidence of violence.” They concluded that “…incestuous and selective literature citations may be acceptable for political tracts, but they introduce a bias into scientific publications…Stating as fact associations which may be demonstrably false is not just unscientific, it is unprincipled.”
A major danger of treating gun violence as a public health issue is that invites a false, politically-driven association of guns with disease, rather than the addressing much more fundamental mental health and social causes underlying violent behavior in general. This mischaracterization is made clear in 1994 American Medical News interview with Dr. Katherine Christoffel, head of the “Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan”, a CDC-funded organization who said: “guns are a virus that must be eradicated… They are causing an epidemic of death by gunshot, which should be treated like any epidemic…you get rid of the virus…get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of deaths.”
In the same article, Mark Rosenberg, who then headed CDC, agreed: “Kathy Christoffel is saying about firearms injuries what has been said for years about AIDS: that we can no longer be silent. That silence equals death and she’s not willing to be silent anymore. She’s asking for help.”
That same year, Rosenberg told the Washington Post: “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like we did with cigarettes. Now it [sic] is dirty, deadly and banned.” And in the previous year, he had subtitled his part of an article on the public health approach to violence published in Atlanta Medicine: “The Bullet as Pathogen.”
This conflation of gun and disease research even drew criticism within other CDC divisions. As C.J. Peters, head of its Special Pathogens Branch told the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette in 1996, “The CDC has got to be careful that we don’t get into social issues. If we’re going to do that, we ought to start a center for social change. We should stay with medical issues.”
In fact, the CDC conducted a major two-year independent study of various regulatory laws in 2003. The investigation considered bans on specified firearms or ammunition; gun registration; concealed-weapon carry; and zero-tolerance for firearms in schools. The study concluded there was “insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed for preventing violence.”
As Don Kates and Henry Schaffer point out in a 1997 Reason article, the main function of treating gun violence as a public health issue with a disease metaphor is to: “…lend a patina of scientific credibility to the belief that guns cause violence…a belief that is hard to justify on empirical grounds.” Kates, a civil liberties lawyer, and Schaffer, a professor of genetics and biomathematics, cite several examples where CDC has sponsored flawed research to advance that belief.
A key go-to guy for many of the CDC’s studies was their favorite gun researcher, Arthur Kellermann, the director of Emory University’s Center for Injury Control. In a 1988 New England Journal of Medicine article, Kellermann and his coauthors cited a book written by James Wright and Peter Rossi titled “Under the Gun” to support their contention that “restricting access to handguns could substantially reduce our annual rate of homicide.” Yet the book actually says the opposite. With reference to that particular notion, it actually said: “There is no persuasive evidence that supports that view.”
Then in 1992, writing in another New England Journal of Medicine piece, Kellermann cited an American Journal of Psychiatry study to back up a claim that “limiting access to firearms could prevent many suicides.” Instead, that study really concluded that suicidal people who don’t have guns find other ways to kill themselves.
CDC funded Kellermann and his colleagues to study whether guns in homes are a benefit or liability for protection from criminal intrusions. According to their examination of 198 incidents in which burglars entered occupied homes in Atlanta, they found that “only three individuals (1.5%) employed a firearm in self –defense”, therefore concluding that guns are rarely used. Closer examination of their data, however, tells a somewhat different story.
In 42% of those incidents, there was no confrontation between the victim and offender because, as they admitted, “the offender(s) either left silently or fled when detected.” When the burglar left silently, the intended victim wasn’t aware of the crime, and therefore had no opportunity to use a gun in self-defense, or alternatively, to call the police. The incidents where would-be intruders “fled when detected”, may actually indicate that that defensive gun ownership can be a crime deterrent, encouraging burglars to flee.
Dropping the 83 no-confrontation incidents from Kellermann’s 198- burglary list leaves 115 which should have been counted. Then, of those remaining, assuming that only about half of U.S. homes had guns at that time… and also that 70% of those that do store them unloaded where their use for self-defense wasn’t feasible… his 1.5% figure rises to 17%.
Even more problematic for his conclusion, Kellermann’s study only covered burglaries reported to police…and since police only catch about 10% of home burglars, the only good reason to report them is for insurance purposes. So if no property was lost because a burglar fled when a household member brandished a gun, many or most of those incidents may not have been recorded.
Kellermann and University of Washington pathologist Donald Reay examined gunshot deaths in King County, Washington from 1978 to 1983, concluding that of 398 people killed in a home where a gun was kept, only two were shot when trying to get in. They also claimed that there were “43 suicides, criminal homicides, or accidental gunshot deaths involving a gun kept in a home for every case of homicide for self-protection.”
Yet research by well-known criminalist Gary Kleck indicates that only a tiny percentage of defensive gun uses result in the deaths of offenders. In fact, even Kellermann and Reay conceded that: “Mortality studies such as ours do not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm. Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed are also not identified.”
Kates and Schaffer observe in their Reason article that “by leaving out such cases, Kellermann and Reay excluded almost all the lives saved, injuries avoided, and property protected by keeping a gun in the home.” Yet they note that gun control advocates continue to use that study as a basis for claims such as, “A gun in the home is 43 times as likely to kill a family member as to be used in self-defense.”
While CDC financing for research on gun violence hasn’t actually stopped completely, it is currently limited to research where firearms are treated only as a component of a broader problem. The CDC asks researchers it funds to give it a heads-up whenever they publish studies related to firearms, and as a courtesy, typically relays this information to the NRA.
As a result of CDC’s sensitivity to controversy, the circle of academics who study gun-related issues has fallen off dramatically, a circumstance that this research community is clearly unhappy about. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis who had his CDC funding cut in 1996, knew who to blame: “The National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress have largely succeeded in choking off the development of evidence upon which that [government gun] policy could be based.”
Yup…you betcha! That “policy” was settled by our by our Constitutional forefathers long ago, and was recently affirmed by our Supreme Court. Those who care about our Second Amendment rights should be grateful that those judgments weren’t rendered on the basis of CDC advice.
source: Forbes
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