Congress' upcoming decision to allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research gun violence won't make a difference unless it also increases funding.
"Viewing gun violence as a public-health problem worthy of research has a lot to offer, and can provide a way forward that brings together advocates on both sides of the gun violence debate," Victor J. Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine, and Mark Rosenberg, founding director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday.
"So what is stopping us? The common refrain is that Congress banned research on gun violence, but that's not correct. The real obstacle is a lack of funding."
The doctors note that the amendment to the annual appropriations bill for the CDC attached by Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark., in 1996, "does not ban research; it bans the CDC from advocating gun-control policies. Those are two distinct things. In fact, we believe the amendment should remain in the appropriations bill as a policy guardrail to focus the research on data collection and analysis that would inform policymakers. It assures legislators that funds appropriated for research will be used only for research.
"But to get the research going, Congress needs to appropriate funding."
Dzau and Rosenberg conclude by noting that Dicky himself in 2012 "called for an end to the de facto freeze on federal gun research. Dickey concluded that the needed research should have started decades before. Dickey died in 2017, but we agreed with his call to action six years ago, and we know he would agree with us now that Congress should act to fund research into gun-violence prevention."
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