California State Sen. Lois Wolk
California lawmakers have agreed to spend $5 million to open a first-in-the-nation gun violence research center, a move intended to circumvent a ban on federal firearm studies.
The research center, which would be based at a campus in the University of California system, would take over a job the federal government dropped 20 years ago. In 1996, Congress — persuaded by then-U.S Rep. Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican and self-proclaimed point man for the NRA on Capitol Hill — cut off funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that could be used to “advocate or promote” gun control.
As FairWarning has reported, that federal research ban has remained intact despite repeated efforts to overturn it, preventing experts from answering vital questions about how to prevent gun deaths and injuries. That knowledge gap, in turn, has thwarted efforts to craft laws to reduce gun violence.
In February, California State Sen. Lois Wolk responded by introducing a bill to set up a firearm research center at one of the 10 UC campuses. The Democratic lawmaker – who represents Davis, a city that is home to a UC campus — in a news release said, “We know that using real data and scientific methods, our best researchers can help policy makers get past the politics and find real answers to this public health crisis to help save lives in California and throughout the country.”
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in the same news release, praised the measure and cited last weekend’s mass shooting in Orlando, Fla. “In light of the terrible shooting in Orlando—the worst mass shooting in U.S. history—it is more important than ever that we enact sensible gun safety reforms. One such reform is the creation of the Firearm Violence Research Center, which will fill the void created by the lack of federal gun research.”
In addition, Dickey, who had a change of heart in the years after his amendment cut off federal gun research, also expressed support. Dickey, in a joint statement with his one-time foe, Mark Rosenberg, who in the 1990s was the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said: “It is crazy for any state to expect its legislators to vote on gun violence legislation if they do not know that it will be effective in both protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners and reducing gun violence. California is setting a very good example by supporting the research that will empower their legislators to protect both its citizens and their gun rights.”
The measure to fund the gun violence research center was part of legislation implementing a new state spending plan approved Wednesday by California lawmakers. It allocates the $5 million for the research center over five years. The office of Gov. Jerry Brown, who has to sign the annual state budget, had no immediate comment on the research center, but he is expected to approve it.
Firearm violence accounts for more than 30,000 deaths a year in the U.S.
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If my aging memory serves … The original problem was a series of papers co-authored by a Dr Arthur Kellermann and financed by the CDC. They are absolute howlers, excellent textbook-quality examples of the misuse of statistics and scientific method to bolster agenda-driven propaganda. (Don’t take my word for it, read them – they used to be difficult but not impossible to find online; but sorry, no links, I found them years ago and have no idea where they might be now.) They were the inspiration for Congress’s attempt to get the CDC to stop wasting taxpayer’s money on “junk science”. Congress first estimated how much money CDC was wasting on this stuff and reduced its budget by that amount. Someone else later put it back in, so CDC didn’t suffer that year, but the writing was clearly on the wall and the “junk science” program was dropped.
Of course this didn’t kill research on the issue, it just squelched the mega-funding CDC was able to waste on it. But the gun-control crowd misses the good doctor’s work. He was the source of the famous “a gun in the home is X times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder” which is still being tossed around today. Kellermann actually wrote no such thing, but that’s what it morphed into by the time the Brady Campaign et al worked their magic on it. (The multiplier X can be any number up to the low two digits, depending on which of Kellermann’s papers is incorrectly quoted.)
Research is one thing. Honest research is quite another.
What are you going to discover? That Democrats want your guns and Republicans are never going to give them up? What a wastes of Mr Bloomeburges money!