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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI will continue to believe that the most destructive aspect of the NRA is the fear of data...
It's not their opposition to gun control legislation. It isn't their paranoia. It isn't their racism. These things are dangerous. But they do not amount to the erasure of fully understanding the problem.
The most dangerous nature of firearm rights groups continues to be their obstructionism against academic research on the subject of firearm violence. We are now 20 years into a freeze, motivated partly by law but mostly by fear of pushback, on federal research for studies examining firearm injury prevention.
What is the result? Well, if we are totally honest with ourselves, we do not possess a very large body of research concerning the causal links between firearm proliferation and firearm violence.
This actually makes the job of groups like the NRA massively easier. In the absence of scientific consensus, in this void, these groups are free to manufacture their own realities and then pump them into public consciousness.
When you control the flow of information, you can diminish your strong arm tactics. This has the added benefit of producing a more pleasant public image. Which is an idea with significant historical precedent.
The timeline goes as such:
In 1996, Congress, under the watch of the NRA, hooked a rule onto an appropriations bill which almost completely cut out funding for "CDC firearm-injury research."
In 2013, it was found that CDC research for firearm-injury had fallen a mind-boggling 96% to just $100,000 of the agency's $5.6 billion budget.
http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.aspx
Based on my rough calculations, firearm related deaths constitute 1.3% of all deaths in the United States annually. But the proportion of CDC funding for research on firearm injury prevention constitutes only .0017% of their total budget.
If we could expect an approximate proportionality between specific type of injury risk and research monies spent on that type of injury risk prevention, we spend at least 764 times less than we should on CDC research into firearm injury prevention.
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm