Republican Who Shut Down Gun Research Now Has ‘Regrets’
This wasn’t entirely a rhetorical question - concerns about the availability of public research on domestic gun violence have been ongoing for two decades.
As we discussed last year, it’s common knowledge that the NRA and its allies have fought to kill any kind of restrictions on firearm ownership. What was less recognized was the fact that the gun lobby also helped block basic data collection, to the point that there’s “no current scientific consensus about guns and violence,” in large part because the NRA “has been able to neutralize empirical cases for control.”
There is no mystery as to how this happened. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began expanding its research into gun-related deaths as a public health issue, so conservatives in Congress added language to the appropriations bill that finances the CDC: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Nearly 20 years later, the principal author of that language, Arkansas Republican Jay Dickey, conceded to the Huffington Post that he has “regrets” over the policy that came to be known as the Dickey Amendment.
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