We’ve been here before. A young man gets his hands on a gun (usually an assault rifle), and he murders a group of people. We cry and grieve and blame one another.
And, then, we move on.
Because the politics of guns in America is just too hard.
The massacre inside a Florida high school may rewrite the final act this time. But even if policy-makers do take action, they will do so knowing less than they should about why killers kill — and how to stop them.
That's because 21 years ago, Congress caved in to a National Rifle Association demand, and effectively, reduced federal spending on gun violence research.
While the "Dickey Amendment" crafted by lawmakers did not ban funding for research, it had the same effect. The amendment prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from advocating for gun control. At the same time, Congress reallocated $2.6 million within the CDC’s budget, which was exactly how much the agency had invested in firearm injuries research the year before.
“Bureaucrats understood what that meant, and they stopped funding it,” said Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “I think that had an effect not just on government research but on all research. ... I think potentially a whole generation of public health research has been affected by the Dickey Amendment.”
It's not that all federal funding ceased; it was more a question of priorities and focus after the Dickey Amendment passed. Which leads to a couple of questions:
Could lives have been saved if, instead, the federal government had committed to an all-out targeted research effort to reduce firearm violence? And would a push by the CDC and other government funders make a difference now? Researchers would love to find out.
Back up for a moment, though, and get a sense of the problem. Consider these statistics:
More than 33,000 people die by firearms in the U.S. every year; roughly two-thirds of them are suicides. Among the top five countries ranked by GDP, the U.S. was far and away the leader in death by firearm assault. Its rate of 4.2 per 100,000 population dwarfed that of the United Kingdom (0.08); Germany (0.12); China (0.07) and Japan (0.05), according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle (2015 statistics). And in Milwaukee, of 12 homicides so far this year, nine of the victims have died by gunfire, the Milwaukee Police Department reports.
Stephen Hargarten compares what happened to gun violence research to the federal effort in the 1980s to battle HIV/AIDS. And both he and Gardiner point to an earlier push to understand why so many Americans were dying in car crashes. Both were serious public health crises at the time. But the attention paid to those problems paid off: AIDS now can be managed by patients and their physicians, and far fewer people die in car accidents.
“HIV/AIDS was ravaging the country, and it was severely politicized because it was hitting a certain population,” said Hargarten, the chair of Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and director of the school’s Comprehensive Injury Center. “But then there was an effective research agenda put forward with resources, and look at what happened.”
During the 1960s and '70s, the federal government took steps to reduce traffic fatalities, and fatalities fell. Later, there were efforts, both public and private, to address drunken driving, and from the early 1980s through about 2010, alcohol-related traffic deaths were "cut in half with the greatest proportional declines among persons 16-20 years old,” the National Institutes of Health reports.
Gun violence and traffic safety are both multifaceted problems, requiring a variety of solutions. “We put in place seat-belt laws, car-makers developed air bags. We had new rules on alcohol. We have backup cameras in our cars. Each one of those changes focused on a different part of the auto death problem in America,” Gardiner said.
Said Hargarten: “I think we have an opportunity to attack gun violence in the same way.”
The Dickey Amendment
Why did Congress do what it did in 1996?
That story begins three years earlier when Arthur Kellermann, then at the University of Tennessee, and his colleagues published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about their CDC-funded firearms research. They found that gun ownership was a "risk factor for homicide in the home.”
Far from making homes safer, their research found, guns made them less safe.
The Kellermann article got a ton of media attention, and the NRA demanded that the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention, which funded the study, be eliminated, according to an account by the American Psychological Association. The center was not eliminated, but Congress warned researchers that “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.” The amendment was authored by the late U.S. Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.).
Then, in a case of Father Congress know best, lawmakers reallocated $2.6 million in the CDC budget from firearm injury research to traumatic brain injury. In the years after that, CDC-funded research into firearm injury prevention dropped 96%, a study by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found.
Dickey, who died last April, came to regret the amendment that bore his name. He and Mark Rosenberg, who was director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the time the amendment passed, wrote in a 2012 Washington Post commentary:
“We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago, but we are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners.”
RELATED: CDC asks researchers for 'heads-up' if they do gun research; tells NRA
There are tantalizing signs that the earth is shifting under the national gun debate. The passion of Florida high school students is one example. So are comments by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), a staunch defender of the Second Amendment. After the Florida shootings, both signaled they would favor more federally funded research into gun violence.The Dickey Amendment only prevents advocacy — not research, Azar noted in congressional testimony earlier this month. “We’re in the science business and the evidence-gathering business, and so I will have our agency certainly working in this field,” he said, according to a Politico report.
But the proof will be in the funding.
After the murders of 20 school kids and six adults inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the Institute of Medicine recommended a wide range of research, Hargarten remembers. President Barack Obama requested funding, “and Congress failed to budget it,” he said.
Researchers have continued to investigate gun violence using private funding and limited federal dollars in the years since the Dickey Amendment was passed. After the Sandy Hook murders, for example, Obama ordered health agencies to sponsor gun studies, which led NIH to issue "three program announcements" specifically targeting firearm violence. Those were not renewed, NIH said Thursday. In all, about $11.4 million in research funding for firearm violence and prevention was granted over three years, according to a Science magazine report.
The research question
Do policy-makers have what they need to make good decisions about gun violence? As with nearly every facet of the gun debate, there is a disagreement about that.
In a Los Angeles Times commentary earlier this week, Devin Hughes and Mark Bryant called out House Speaker Paul Ryan and other politicians for failing to act after Ryan cautioned against doing anything "before we even have all the facts and the data." Hughes is founder of GVPedia and Bryant the executive director of Gun Violence Archive, both of which make gun research available to the public.
GVPedia has amassed more than 700 academic studies and papers on the topic of gun violence, most of which were published after 1996. They contend this work tells "a clear story about what can help stop mass shootings in America.”
But advocates for gun control and researchers say significant holes remain in our understanding of the problem, especially school shootings and the impact of the 1994 assault weapons ban. They want targeted funding programs from federal agencies that clearly signal the government believes gun violence is a problem.
Hargarten would start by trying to figure out how better to identify high-risk youth. Gardiner would ask the CDC “to research disparities in gun deaths in different parts of America, especially vulnerable populations.”
And who knows what a true, full-court press by the federal government could do? It's worth finding out, Hargarten said.
"The CDC, NIH, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the National Institute of Justice also should be involved in this research agenda," he told me. "With the scope of deaths, it deserves a broad group of researchers, and you should fund centers of excellence. We should have research done all over the country at academic research centers just like we do for other complex public health burdens."
David D. Haynes
My take: First of all this is a mind-blowing outrage that, because of "pressure"(threat of money to oppose or withdrawal of money to help congressmen get elected) from the NRA, research into something as astronomically important as the effect of guns on home safety could be effectively banned. How bizarro world turned on it's head can something become? Of course it is not a direct ban but the net effect has essentially been a chilling effect on any other research on gun safety in homes and so there it is before your face and it is let to sit there as it is and nothing is done to continue research through other means? After a month the congressmen see the net effect discouraging research and do nothing, a year passes and nothing. Their mission accomplished. Really?
The first time I heard this I thought that it should be impossible and illegal that any company or group could lobby congress to stop research as important and relevant as this to the American people's best interests. In fact it strikes me as laughable and as un-American as anything could possibly be yet we in America have for 21 years allowed this kind of ban to go on, a repression of something trying to get at the truth where our health and lives are gravely concerned. I mean it sounds like something the mafia would concoct to cover something up.
Am I even thinking this out and writing this correctly? Could this possibly fly here in America, that congressmen could be bought off by the N.R.A. or any company or association to the extent that a study on the safety of homes with guns could be stopped and that it would stand for even one week let alone 21 years? A ban that is passed for the financial interests of the NRA ignoring the safety interests of U.S. citizens? I mean what is this, something akin to a repressive communist nation or corrupt banana republic controlled by the N.R.A. that they could actually get away with this?
That is just wholly crazy and has to be be one of most outrageous examples of the corruption resulting from the ongoing lack of campaign finance reform and the need to overturn Citizen's United(citizen's betrayed). I mean honor, integrity and principle just fly out the window with this. It really borders on something akin to treason in trying to curtail the ability for Americans to protect themselves from over-proliferation of guns or for that matter anything that is a part of thousands of deaths every year.
Let me see if got this right, YOU, America, have allowed this to go on, for congressmen to ban, to stifle research into the effect and dangers of firearms in homes across America?
I have allowed it but vaguely knew about it but that stops here.
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