The SDFP Science Corner because science is now a liberal conspiracy
United Nations “No Guns”
By Anna Daniels
“As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” Samuel Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber)
Let’s get right down to it. How many dead kids are we talking about? Doesn’t the public have the right to know how many dead kids are watering the tree of liberty with their blood?
The short answer is that we don’t know and if Congress continues to have its way, we will never know. ProPublica reports that “Since 1996, when a small CDC-funded study [Center for Disease Control] on the risks of owning a firearm ignited opposition from Republicans, the CDC’s budget for research on firearms injuries has shrunk to zero.”
Gun violence data, firearm safety and gun violence prevention are removed from the realm of public health discussions and research because Congress is cowed by the NRA leadership, gun manufacturers and the lobbyists they employ. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who is cosponsoring a bill to give the CDC ten million dollars a year for conducting or supporting research on gun violence prevention states that “gun violence kills twice as many children as cancer, and yet political grandstanding has halted funding for public health research to understand this crisis.”
What kind of research would this entail?
Among the questions that need answers, according to the report: How often do Americans successfully use guns to protect themselves each year? Could improved “smart gun” technologies reduce gun deaths and injuries, and will consumers be willing to adopt them? And would universal background checks — the most popular and prominent gun control policy proposal — actually reduce gun violence?
The NRA’s unsurprising response is that this kind of research is unethical, anti-gun propaganda. Over the past seven years the CDC has spent less than $100,000 a year on fire-arm focused work that is only able to provide a rough annual estimate of the number of fire-arm injuries.
The NRA blackmail against the Surgeon General nominee The Senate confirmation proceedings to confirm Vivek Murthy as Surgeon General have ground to a stop. Murthy, a Boston doctor and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, signed on to a letter promulgated by health professionals saying that “strong measures to reduce gun violence must be taken immediately.” This letter advocates for the following measures:
1. Remove military-style guns and ammunition that are designed to be able to kill large numbers of people quickly. There may be a place in war for such weapons, but they represent a threat to public safety in our neighborhoods.
2. Strengthen safety measures and regulations for guns used for hunting, sport, and self-protection.
3. Remove prohibitions and barriers that keep health professionals from protecting our patients from harm.
4. Remove prohibitions that impede valuable research and data-tracking related to gun violence and firearm safety.
5. Create a Presidential advisory committee of various stakeholders, including health care providers, to make recommendations to the President and Congress and monitor progress on cutting gun deaths in half by 2020.
The NRA’s blackmail appears to be working– Senators are scored by the NRA for their votes on all things gun related. The NRA has determined that the Surgeon General nomination is clearly a gun issue. A low NRA score on any Congressional vote is perceived as a political kiss of death for Democrats as well as Republicans.
The good Dr. Murthy has testified that he would focus on the nation’s obesity epidemic, not gun violence, during his tenure as surgeon general.
So what about “smart guns?” The short answer is that they are also DOA.
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“As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” Samuel Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) This is what the “good guy with a gun” wants us to believe.
As Charlie Pierce is wont to say: “This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.”
Anna Daniels
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We have no choice but to revive gun control politically. Each time the grotesque takes place, the NRA sends out appeals to gun owners for money. Gun extremists are growing wilder. The more frequently the gun industry and its cultists are forced into bizarre positions elevating the gun to the ultimate American icon the more murderously ridiculous they will appear.
There will be a day when common sense and science will rise well above the mountain of public relations debris these strange people have erected.
Ah, would that it were so. But I fear you are being idealistic in the extreme.
Make the gun freaks speak. Make them go the whole distance and confess that they couldn’t use their hands and so adopted the gun, that their minds can’t stop thinking of the metal and the machine and the insult that guy threw at them. Make them lose their minds in front of city councils and neighborhood watch groups. Let them wear their camouflage and cowboy hats and march in July 04 parades, and struggle to say, “Guns don’t kill people… hippies do.”
Ask them what they’re afraid of.
Ask them why cars and booze and tobacco and marijuana should be regulated, but weapons not.
Gun violence is as American as cherry pie as someone once said … Stokely Carmichael? Not until there are enough American citizens who place the value of their childrens’ lives above their supposed constitutional rights will we ever get out of this dilemma. Sam Wurzelbacher’s mentality is where the majority of the American people are at. I guess it’s up to the billionaires to fight it out. Former Mayor Bloomberg is putting his billions in favor of restricting gun rights. Let’s hope he and others can do some good and convince the American people that the right of their children to live is a greater right than the right to shoot a gun. Michael Moore has said that he is not even amazed any more at mass shootings. After all they’re a commonplace, everyday occurrence.
The problem is the gun nuts in their true heart of hearts actually believe their right to possess and cary a firearm = protection of their children. The nuttier amongst the already nutty even talk about taking out those who would even attempt to restrict their firearm ownership and the irony of that completely eludes them.
God bless Richard Martinez for speaking out so forcefully and emotionally against this gun culture after his son was killed in Isla Vista. A few outraged people can make a huge difference in getting rid of this American obsession with guns. By the way the constitution doesn’t protect them. It’s all in the interpretation. We need to take down the NRA and all the stupid assed Republican (and some Democratic) politicians in Washington who stand with the gun lobby.
I understand that some people shouldn’t have guns – it’s just that most of those people are cops and soldiers. I do not like the NRA people and I certainly wish guns never existed. But, Tecumseh used a rifle, so did Sitting Bull, Michael Collins, the Deacons of Defense (ok, shot guns in their case), MEND, and Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
As long as guns will be used for oppression, guns must be used to resist oppression. We must never forget that while tragedies like these are commonplace. The cops are shooting many, many more.
I don’t buy the argument that guns don’t protect people, if they didn’t why would cops and soldiers have them? Why was the survival rate of Jews who participated in the Warsaw Uprising higher than Jews who didn’t? Why did Martin Luther King Jr. ask for the Deacons as security on multiple occasions? Why were many of the IRA’s first targets British police arsenals and weapons caches?
Ms. Daniels asks “Doesn’t the public have the right to know how many dead kids are watering the tree of liberty with their blood?” You will be happy to know that this information is available, just as it has been for years, at the CDC’s WISQARS injury research statistics web site http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/index.html . You will also be happy to know (or maybe not, since it militates against your gun control advocacy) that fatal firearm accidents have been declining for decades. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports also show a long downward trend in firearm homicides.
Aren’t you curious why Congress defunded the CDC’s gun “research”? I testified before the House Appropriations Committee in 1996 during its hearings about this scandal. And scandal it was, because the CDC was using taxpayer dollars to push a political campaign against gun ownership. Congress rightfully cut funding for the CDC’s shenanigans and forbade such politicking in the future.
For a firsthand account of what really happened at the CDC in the 1990s, check my three part series “Public Health Gun Control: A Brief History”, with part II at http://www.drgo.us/?p=285 .
Timothy Wheeler, MD
Director
Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership
A Project of the Second Amendment Foundation
1. The article clearly states “Over the past seven years the CDC has spent less than $100,000 a year on fire-arm focused work that is only able to provide a rough annual estimate of the number of fire-arm injuries.” So yes, the CDC provides an annual estimate.
2 What you describe as “anti-gun propaganda” is scientific research and data gathering. We support scientific research and data gathering at this site. We also believe that gun violence is a public health issue.
3. “gun deaths have dropped.” That’s an argument for what exactly? School children were slaughtered at Newton CT; theater goers were mowed down in Colorado. And “gun deaths have dropped.”
Dr Wheeler- how many children have watered the tree of liberty with their blood? You don’t seem to know or much care.
Ms. Daniels, I understand the emotion around this issue. Anyone hoping to influence public opinion, rather than lead a mob, is morally obliged to moderate that emotion enough to be able to see facts. My articles deal with the facts, as you can see from the references in those articles, especially Part III. Much of the controversy around the CDC and other medical institutions in the 1990s and since has centered on their unwillingness to deal with scientific research contrary to their openly avowed political agenda of gun control. They suppressed contrary firearm research (which is abundant, by the way) by refusing to acknowledge it in their papers. Medical journals did the same. Consequently they lost credibility on the issue of firearms, and deservedly so.
Waving a bloody shirt is unseemly conduct for a thought leader. And it never works for long with the public, either. I suggest you put aside the incendiary language and take an honest look at the data. Again I refer you to my articles, starting with Part II http://www.drgo.us/?p=285 .