All of Federal grant funding needs to be looked into for stuff like this.

(from the JAMA article)

Injury prevention research can have real and lasting effects. Over the last 20 years, the number of Americans dying in motor vehicle crashes has decreased by 31%.1 Deaths from fires and drowning have been reduced even more, by 38% and 52%, respectively.1 This progress was achieved without banning automobiles, swimming pools, or matches. Instead, it came from translating research findings into effective interventions.

Given the chance, could researchers achieve similar progress with firearm violence? It will not be possible to find out unless Congress rescinds its moratorium on firearm injury prevention research. Since Congress took this action in 1997, at least 427,000 people have died of gunshot wounds in the United States, including more than 165 000 who were victims of homicide.

To put these numbers in context, during the same time period, 4,586 Americans lost their lives in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was agenda driven...in other words, like tobacco, things were found that they don't want t be spoken off.

And gun sales are soaring.

CNN is now amazing.

The emergency rooms at major hospitals in big cities are frightful places. Too many of the indigent victims of the NRA end their lives in those emergency rooms at those hospitals.

Working in one of those emergency rooms requires on the one hand great compassion and dedication and, on the other, cold detachment.

Generals in the military who see their troops decimated in battle are perhaps the only other people who witness the horror that guns and other weapons perpetrate.

Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people. Same for bombs. We really don't need this. We really don't need the NRA.

they have betrayed us all when it comes to coming up against powerful corporate and political interests to protect human health. It is always the doctors' careers that are placed on the line and no one backs them up.
Disgrace.

If there ain't no facts, there ain't no problem!

I had to purchase this article years ago, so I cannot post a link. If I could, you'd probably have to pay for it.

Rosenberg announced an unscientific war on gun rights. (In science, the data drives the conclusion; Rosenberg started out knowing the answer and wanting to use "science" to support it.)

After announcing his intent to use the CDC as a propaganda vehicle to treat guns like cigarettes—"dirty, deadly - and banned"—he was shocked and appalled that the NRA choked off his premeditated fraud.

Rosenberg needed "scientific" cover at taxpayer expense to fund his pre-planned findings and solution. The NRA denied him that cover. This has nothing to do with legitimate science.

Dirty and dangerous however they are, just like guns.

After Mr LaPierre's little rant on Friday you really want to come here and tout the objectivity and concern for the welfare of Americans of the NRA?

That seems more than a bit delusional.

We know that the NRA is the propaganda arm of the gun manufacturers, please stop trying to blow smoke up our asses by telling us they give the slightest fuck about anything else.

I said nothing about the NRA except what they did. They are an advocacy group. ANY advocacy group—left or right, good or bad—that finds that you are planning to use taxpayer money and "science" to wage a propaganda war will fight back.

I didn't tout anyone's objectivity and concern for the welfare of Americans.

I'm sure you can tell me somewhere that cigarettes are "banned".

I'm pretty sure the CDC has the welfare of Americans in mind, the NRA on the other hand I know has the welfare of gun manufacturers in mind exclusively.

We definitely look at cars from the public health perspective, what's wrong with looking at guns the same way?

Whether or not cigarettes are banned, there was definitely a desire to ban guns. That's what the words I QUOTED said. If cigarettes aren't banned like he wants guns to be, that's his mistake—not mine.

There is nothing wrong with legitimate scientific inquiry, but agenda driven inquiry is not legitimate.

when's the last time you could light up in a bar? An airport? A mall?

I agree that starting with the answer is not science, but you are extending this to excuse doing no research into the matter what so ever, or am I reading you wrong? Or maybe he had findings and made a declaration that something needed to be done.

Or are you suggesting that the NRA types are correct that any talk about gun control will end up with a ban on firearms, in which case maybe that is the correct route to take?

That may or may not be true but I wouldn't believe anyone about anything if they told me cigarettes are "banned" when you can buy the damn things in any convenience store in the country if you are 18 or older and often if you are under 18.

Using the word "banned" in the context of cigarettes completely destroys his credibility.

As well as posting an unsourceable article, but I was giving the benefit of the doubt here.

call me a liar after spending money to read it. Or maybe you would be classy enough to apologize.

Incidentally, you called it unsourceable when it is fully sourced—author, date, publication, page number. Should you get the benefit of the doubt for that factually false statement? A link is not the only type of source.

instead of putting up strawman after strawman (getting offended, demanding an apology, playing the membership card, etc) If you have no argument just say so, no need to get defensive about it.

What am I trying to say? My post clearly said what I was trying to say. Many have projected their own prejudices onto what I said, but I actually said what I wanted to say.

Here are some examples of projection:

That's not what I said. Not even close.



And she might be unbiased. It's even possible that the CDC culture is unbiased. Even if the CDC is quite biased, I never said or implied that no entity anywhere could do unbiased science on the issue of guns. That is a preposterous reading of what I said.

One irony is that there was more than "one government official 17 years ago"—I'm going on memory here, but the JAMA itself ran a piece on another government official who telegraphed CDC plans to use the medical profession to push a pre-planned agenda. As I recall, he realized that his statement on the record was very obviously against the scientific method and attempted to retract his published statement.

Let's change the subject slightly and look at a somewhat similar situation. Let's say that someone, in the interest of painting black civil rights organizations as unpatriotic and borederline criminal, made a point of the fact that they didn't trust the FBI. And let's say further that I anwered with records of how they illegally surveilled and harassed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And let's say that that was 17 years ago.

Saying that black civil rights leaders don't trust the FBI—our wonderful, heroic, patriotic protectors—leaves one impression. Once people understand the history—and the MLK part is just that, a part—it makes one see the whole thing in a somewhat different light.

The impression that a reader of the OP would be left with—the NRA and others oppose CDC gun research because they fear that a perfectly innocent scientific inquiry by scientists open to all results would find that guns are bad—is a false impression. The CDC formulated and announced a program to use "science" to achieve their pre-determined ends.

...it is worth pointing out that there was gun violence research that preceded both this entire conspiracy theory of yours and GOP suppression of research funding. The defunding of the CDC research by Republicans was a direct response to the fact that the research on gun violence was not turning out the way the NRA wanted. Researchers had found that guns were used in crimes much more frequently than in self-defense, that owning a gun increased, rather than reduced, the chances that a person would be a homicide victim, and so on.

It was based on scientific results, and not on "bias", that public health researchers and officials proposed trying to combat gun violence using the anti-smoking campaign as a model. Not to mention the fact that the whole idea that a single CDC official would be able to corrupt the scientific establishment, the top universities and journals, all for the sake of some political crusade, is pretty preposterous on face...

Every gungeoneer loves to quote them some statistics to sound smart. And about 10 seconds of examination have always shown me the numbers should definitely be better. That actual data collection and solid experimental methodology should be used. Now, thanks to your cut-and-paste (your fourth time if Google is not incomplete) I now know why no solid scientific studies exist.

The NRA kills them through BACK ROOM LAW WRITING and bribed politicians. The NRA thinks they are more important than free scientific inquiry.

If this was unscientific, the people who can judge science -- you know scientists -- will tell you that. They do all the time. The peer-review system works and has worked for hundreds of years. Crank science has always been shown for what it is. If this guy was a crank, he'd be out in a second. But the NRA did what the carbon producers couldn't do. They wrote laws to subvert the process. To make it forbidden to even look. Not just for this guy, for everyone.

In the end, all you have shown is that gun lovers are the enemies of truly free inquiry. You fear it. You fear what it might say.

Why is it always about fear with you guys?

because one government official 17 years ago was allegedly biased.

I don't know where the villain of your piece, Mark Rosenberg, is now. According to the CDC website, the current head of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) is Dr. Linda C. Degutis.

Assuming for the sake of the argument that all your accusations against Rosenberg are true, it wouldn't have justified a total ban even when he was in office. Now, years later, the ban doesn't even come close to being a defensible policy.

Unlike the gungeon, you are probably going to find more scientifically literate people in GD who understand the scientific process and also it's perversion at the hands of an industry lobby. Good like trying to paint the NRA as the good guy protecting Americans from the evil and biased CDC.

The gun lobby is far from the first right-wing lobby trying to shut down politically inconvenient research. And the denialists always have some sentence or two to take out of context and insist that it's all some big conspiracy. I'm surprised that, with all the gun nuts on the internet, the best they could come up with is this one quote from 20 years ago. I mean, at least the global warming deniers have the "climategate" emails...

If there were legitimate scientific objections to the research, then they would appear in the peer-reviewed journals. The NRA knows it can't win the argument on scientific grounds, so instead they suppress the science.

"Good guy," "bad guy," "right-wing," "evil," "denialists," "conspiracy," "nuts"...

Sounds very logical and technical. Fact based, too. Is that what you consider "science" talk, just like your bald-faced personal lie about me? I guess if lying is part of the "scientific method", this shouldn't suprise me.

I gave a factual, historical reason why there has been resistance to CDC "science" on guns. There's more to the story than this single quote, but it would all be wasted on you anyway. And as for accusing me of ripping a quote out of context, that's another falsehood. Read the entire article if you can find it or read the part I supplied. IIRC, it was quite short—I only left out a paragraph or two.

The quotation is perfectly in context with the article. If it is out of context with the interview, it was the highly areeable and supportive reporter who did the ripping. Yet you accused me of taking the quote "out of context." I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you don't know or don't care what "out of context" actually means.

All's fair in "science", right?

What you gave was the right-wing's excuse for trying to suppress scientific research on gun violence. Like I said, with all the gun nut bloggers, I'm surprised the best y'all can do is a few sentences from twenty years ago. The climate change denialists are way ahead of you guys -- at least they have some emails from actual scientists, that include words like "hide". You have a couple sentences that outline a public health strategy for combatting gun violence.

The historical reason for the resistance to gun violence research is purely political. The right has always believed that the scientific establishment is conspiring against them. And industries don't like research indicating that their products are dangerous. If the facts aren't on your side, you attack the funding.

The data support the idea that having a gun in the home makes one more likely to be the victim of homicide. The data also support the idea that having a gun makes one more likely to be shot in an assault. The fact that the data don't support the conclusions you'd like them to doesn't really make them "unscientific".

eom

nt

federal agencies from sharing gun crime related information with other departments? I know I remember it but I don't know if I remember correctly.

I do recall the NRA stopping all AMA talk that guns were a public health problem. This arose from ER doctors trying to patch together people shot and then ending up in ERs.

It is a public health problem and no one should be silenced in talking about it.

We should all share this story as much as possible.

research Holder approves.

Funding for such research is available from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Violence Policy Center (VPC).

Obama was a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funds VPC to ban handguns so he should be able to get private funding.