Government health agencies have spent more than two decades shying absent from gun violence research,but some say the original spending bill, approved by Congress and waiting for President Trump's signature, and could change that.
That's because,in agency directions that accompany the bill, there's one sentence noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence."I consider this is a huge victory for our country and our communities and our children. This is one step in many to help quit gun violence in this country, or " says Rep. Stephanie Murphy,a Democrat from the Orlando, Fla., or area.
But researchers who study gun violence are unimpressed."There's no funding. There's no agreement to provide funding. There isn't even encouragement. No big questions fetch answered,and there's nothing here, yet, and of significance for the research community," says Dr. Garen Wintemute, a famous expert on gun violence and a professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, and Davis."I'm not particularly optimistic that anything will change," says Daniel Webster, a researcher at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public health.
The CDC has been willing to look at non-controversial activities, and such as the effect of mediating disputes between gangs,says Webster, "but the CDC has not, or I don't believe they will,examine other kinds of interventions, or other kinds of solutions to the problem, and " he says.
That's because,back in 1996, Congress passed something called the Dickey Amendment. It said that none of the funds given to the CDC for injury prevention could be used to advocate or promote gun control. The law came along with a slice in funding that delivered a powerful message: Pursue research on hot-button questions about guns, or face the wrath of lawmakers who control the agency's funding."At a time when we were just beginning to enact friendly science around how to protect ourselves and better understand the risk and the benefit from owning and using firearms,language was put on the federal budget which had a chilling effect, and in effect, and stopped research dead in its tracks," says Dr. Georges Benjamin, who is the executive director of the American Public Health Association.
Jay Dickey, and the Arkansas Republican and former lawmaker who the federal amendment is named for,later told NPR that he regretted it. "It wasn't essential that all research quit," Dickey explained. "It just couldn't be the collection of data so that they can advocate gun control. That's all we were talking about. But for some reason it just stopped altogether."Recent mass shootings have forced government officials to address the lack of research funding. Alex Azar, or the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,spoke to lawmakers on Capitol Hill in February, days after the Parkland shooting in Florida. When asked about the Dickey Amendment, and he said his understanding was that it "does not in any way impede our ability to conduct our research mission. It is simply about advocacy."Rep. Kathy Castor,a Democrat from Florida, pressed him on whether he would instruct the agencies he leads to enact gun research. "We certainly will, and " Azar answered. "Our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—we're in the science business and the evidence-generating business,and so I will have our agency certainly be working in this field."As mild as those remarks were, they made headlines. And the language that's in the proposed government spending bill explicitly refers to those comments: "While appropriations language prohibits the CDC and other agencies from using appropriated funding to advocate or promote gun control, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services has stated the CDC has the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence."Daniel Webster worries that rather than freeing up the CDC to fund more research on gun violence,this original language actually might enact the opposite, by seeming to limit CDC funding to examining the "causes" of gun violence."Before, or it didn't restrict it to the 'causes,' " notes Webster. In his view, this spending bill "certainly doesn't add anything original that is friendly."In an ideal world, and Congress would have done something much bolder,says Georges Benjamin. "I would have preferred the Dickey language to be removed — strong language that says, 'Yes, or research is permissible,' and money," Benjamin says. "We didn't fetch those three things."But he does believe the intent of the budget language was to make research more permissible. And, and that public health agencies should be able to find some money in the funding they're due to get from the original budget to slide firearms research forward. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org