The Democrats are big believers in science so long as the results support their preconceived biases. For instance, they loved science when it supported anthropogenic global warming, but now that the data is anything but conclusive they have resorted to tampering with the data and silencing critics. The same is true with firearms. Every major study of firearms has shown, in the words of John Lott, “more guns, less crime.” Yet the left hangs onto small, mostly anecdotal studies that claim otherwise. This is because these larger studies have been done by people with no vested interest in the outcome. Just as the left has to rely on Michael “the Jerry Sandusky of Climate Change” Mann to “hide the decline” and create his totally bogus “hockey stick” graph, the left wants to put research on gun violence — whatever that may be — in the hands of their loyal soldiers in the CDC.

House Democrats are adding a controversial new demand to the government funding talks: ending a 19-year old ban on gun violence research by the federal government.
Minority Leader [mc_name name=’Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’P000197′ ] (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that Democrats will insist that the research ban be removed from law as part of the $1.1 trillion omnibus that Congress needs to pass by next week to fund the government.

The California Democrat said ending the ban will be a “priority” in the government funding bill. But she stopped short of saying Democrats would refuse to pass the funding measure if it’s not included.

“There’s a vehicle leaving the station, it’s called the omnibus bill — a bus leaving the station, omnibus bill…and we must insist that we cannot have a bill leave the station that still has that ban on research in it,” Pelosi said.

The first thing to note is that this threat of Pelosi’s is disingenuous bullsh** that is being spouted for use in fundraising emails to her low IQ fans. No spending bill is going to leave the House that requires Democrat votes. House Democrats are simply not relevant at all.

But there is a reason she wants the funding and there is an even better reason that the funding is banned. The 1996 ban on the CDC “researching” gun violence came about because at its core, the CDC is staffed by partisan Democrats. Their first mode of attack is to declare something to be a “public health” threat and then they go about trying to legislate and regulate their way forward. For instance, obesity is a health risk factor. Depending upon your genetics obesity may or may not be an important consideration. In 1998, CDC led the effort to redefine the BMI for “overweight” from 27.8 to 25. Literally, overnight 29 million Americans went from a healthy weight to overweight. This change was a boon for CDC, it got a lot more money to research the “obesity epidemic”, and for Pharma, which wants to find a pill to fix weight problems.

What were the problems?

The public health push for banning guns goes back to the late 1980s at least. In a 1989 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) official Patrick O’Carroll, MD stated “We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” (P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, CDC, quoted in Marsha F. Goldsmith, “Epidemiologists Aim at New Target: Health Risk of Handgun Proliferation,” Journal of the American Medical Association vol. 261 no. 5, February 3, 1989, pp. 675-76.) The CDC’s anti-gun activism ran unabated until the mid-1990s. We shall discuss those events in Part II of this series.

These medical researchers insist that what they call “gun violence” is a public health problem. That they prefer the term “gun violence” is revealing of their mind set in approaching the problem, because it puts the emphasis on guns and not on the humans who misuse them. This misleading public health terminology, enthusiastically repeated by fellow gun control advocates in the mainstream media, ignores the fact that almost none of America’s 80 to 100 million gun owners have any role whatsoever in the misuse of guns. Normative gun ownership is foreign to most mainstream media personalities and to public health anti-gun rights advocates. They fear guns and gun owners, and they have no interest in learning about them or respecting their views. These prejudices and fears drive their campaign to bring ever more regulation to American gun owners.

It is for these reasons that public health gun control advocates typically say such reckless things as:

“Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.”—Dr. Katherine Christoffel, pediatrician, in American Medical News, January 3, 1994. In the 1990s Dr. Christoffel was the leader of the now-defunct HELP Network, a Chicago-based association of major medical organizations and grant seekers advancing gun control in the medical media. The name HELP was an acronym for Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan.

“Data on [assault weapons’] risks are not needed, because they have no redeeming social value.—Jerome Kassirer, M.D., former editor, New England Journal of Medicine, writing in vol. 326, no. 17, page 1161 (April 23, 1992).

“I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned.”—Assistant Dean Deborah Prothrow-Stith, M.D., Harvard School of Public Health in her book Deadly Consequences.

These astonishing public statements reveal how thin the veneer of reason can be, even in our supposed leading voices of science. When prejudice and emotion cloud their thinking, all their erudition can’t prevent the transformation of these worthies into raving ideologues. All three were made aware of the voluminous criminology literature that called into serious question their devotion to banning guns. The first two were offered several opportunities to at least read and rebut the criminology literature of the time, as well as to discuss gun policy rationally with their opponents. Neither bothered to debate the issues. Instead they dismissed our evidence out of hand. (See the figure of an American Medical News article about Dr. Christoffel)

In fact, the CDC funded one academic to publish a pro-gun control newsletter. Go to the link before the blockquote. Read it all. You’ll see the depths of blatant fraud and corruption in government funded research about guns.

Why is it so important for the gun grabbers to have federally funded research is simple. They could do the same thing with foundation money but then the research would be revealed for what it is: hokum. If the government funds the research, then no matter how biased and utterly fraudulent it is, they can say it was an unbiased study.

Gun violence is a public safety problem not a public health problem. There is nothing anyone is going to learn about it by giving money to left wing academics.