Let's research gun violence.

[Direckshun]

I've said this in a couple other threads, but I don't believe that gun control is going to get any traction in Congress. Some Democrats will push for it, some other Republicans will table it, some pro-gun control folks like myself will cry foul, and yet another Congress will pass without any gun control measures seeing the light of day.

But here's one thing that maybe we can start doing: better educate ourselves on gun violence, so we can stop stabbing in the dark as to what we can better do to mitigate it.

The problem is that for a couple decades now, the government has not been able to produce any information on gun violence because the NRA has been threatening war if Congress failed to choke off all funding for gun-related research.

The CDC and NIH used to conduct research for decades, but around the time of the late 90s, the NRA became so powerful it was able to prevent these agencies from granting funds to researchers on those topics. McClatchy DC:

The CDC and NIH award billions in grants. They fund research into cancer, brain injury, tobacco use, obesity, AIDS, abortion, hearing loss, allergies, infectious diseases, back pain and virtually everything else related to human health. But gun violence is the one area that carries that specific language. The effect has been to limit federal funding into research that could be used to shape policy.

This is irresponsible. We pass hundreds of gun-related laws across the country every few years. Like all laws, we should be able to research the impact of the laws we pass, so we can make decisions based on more than pure ideology.

Anyway, there's a ton of stories on this, but here's a really good one from last year in the Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us...anted=all&_r=0

N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say
By MICHAEL LUO
Published: January 25, 2011

In the wake of the shootings in Tucson, the familiar questions inevitably resurfaced: Are communities where more people carry guns safer or less safe? Does the availability of high-capacity magazines increase deaths? Do more rigorous background checks make a difference?

The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done. And there is a reason for that. Scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the National Rife Association has all but choked off money for such work.

“We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” said Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was for about a decade the leading source of financing for firearms research.

Chris Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said his group had not tried to squelch genuine scientific inquiries, just politically slanted ones.

“Our concern is not with legitimate medical science,” Mr. Cox said. “Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.”

The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, researchers say.

The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.

Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing that its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the disease control centers’ budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before.

“It’s really simple with me,” Mr. Dickey, 71 and now retired, said in a telephone interview. “We have the right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms that we have.”

The Senate later restored the money but designated it for research on traumatic brain injury. Language was also inserted into the centers’ appropriations bill that remains in place today: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

The prohibition is striking, firearms researchers say, because there are already regulations that bar the use of C.D.C. money for lobbying for or against legislation. No other field of inquiry is singled out in this way.

In the end, researchers said, even though it is murky what exactly is allowed under this provision and what is not, the upshot is clear inside the centers: the agency should tread in this area only at its own peril.

“They had a near-death experience,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, whose study on the risks versus the benefits of having guns in the home became a focal point of attack by the N.R.A.

In the years since, the C.D.C. has been exceedingly wary of financing research focused on firearms. In its annual requests for proposals, for example, firearms research has been notably absent. Gail Hayes, spokeswoman for the centers, confirmed that since 1996, while the agency has issued requests for proposals that include the study of violence, which may include gun violence, it had not sent out any specifically on firearms.

“For policy to be effective, it needs to be based on evidence,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, who had his C.D.C. financing cut in 1996. “The National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress have largely succeeded in choking off the development of evidence upon which that policy could be based.”

Private foundations initially stepped into the breach, but their attention tends to wax and wane, researchers said. They are also much more interested in work that leads to immediate results and less willing to finance basic epidemiological research that scientists say is necessary to establishing a foundation of knowledge about the connection between guns and violence, or the lack thereof.

The National Institute of Justice, part of the Justice Department, also used to finance firearms research, researchers said, but that money has also petered out in recent years. (Institute officials said they hoped to reinvigorate financing in this area.)

Stephen Teret, founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, estimated that the amount of money available for firearms research was a quarter of what it used to be. With so much uncertainty about financing, Mr. Teret said, the circle of academics who study the phenomenon has fallen off significantly.

After the centers’ clash with the N.R.A., Mr. Teret said he was asked by C.D.C. officials to “curtail some things I was saying about guns and gun policy.”

Mr. Teret objected, saying his public comments about gun policy did not come while he was on the “C.D.C. meter.” After he threatened to file a lawsuit against the agency, Mr. Teret said, the officials backed down and gave him “a little bit more leeway.”

C.D.C. financing for research on gun violence has not stopped completely, but it is now mostly limited to work in which firearms are only a component.

The centers also ask researchers it finances to give it a heads-up anytime they are publishing studies that have anything to do with firearms. The agency, in turn, relays this information to the N.R.A. as a courtesy, said Thomas Skinner, a spokesman for the centers.

Invariably, researchers said, whenever their work touches upon firearms, the C.D.C. becomes squeamish. In the end, they said, it is often simply easier to avoid the topic if they want to continue to be in the agency’s good graces.

Dr. Stephen Hargarten, professor and chairman of emergency medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, used to direct a research center, financed by the C.D.C., that focused on gun violence, but he said he had now shifted his attention to other issues.

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by RedNeckRaider

How about this, myself and countless other law abiding gun owners have not given you or anyone else reason to surrender any of our guns or limit the capacity of ammunition they can hold.

Your second amendment rights are very much in tact, in Direckshun's ideal gun policy world (no semiautos, high clip magazines, restrictions on most if not all public ground, etc).

[CoMoChief]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

I would argue against assault weapons because of their capacity for death, not their existence in any particular tragedy.

Dude...you take any motivated nutcase into a gun free zone like a school and they can go to town COD style either way you look at it. They can do it w/ fertilizer and stick on dynamite and make a bomb and you'd get the same issue/result. DEAD CHILDREN

Had this mother not kept her guns out to where nutty mcnutcase had access to them (like most responsible parents do w/ guns and their children) this wouldn't even be an issue.

There are some things that are out of our control. Criminals will always be criminals and will find ways to circumvent the law. They always have...punishing those who are lawful citizens isn't the answer.

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

The Swiss simply prove that YOUR premise has no basis in reality. You are claiming that all Western countries have basically the same cultures and yet we have 12X the gun violence. Your then go on to state that this is because we have ready access to guns. Therefore (now try to follow along) if any other Western nation had easy access to guns it too would have high gun violence.

This is wrong on two counts.

1. Because there is one exception to a rule does not discount the rule. It can and has been argued that the Swiss are an aberration based on the country's extraordinary socioeconomic factors and unique internal politics that aren't really duplicated anywhere else on earth (see prior piece from Business Insider).

2. It is much less likely that, to reduce our gun violence rates, we need to embrace policies closer to the vast majority of our Western brethren, other than the completely unrealistic goal of modeling ourselves after Switzerland.

Originally Posted by AustinChief

This article is awesome in every way except its completely wrong conclusions.

el oh el

Originally Posted by AustinChief

The author, much like you, is blinded by his belief driven agenda and fails to take into account the true import of the facts he spouts. He points out that the Swiss can't be compared to America because they are so different from America. (Militia state, less population, less poverty, etc) Ok, fine it isn't the same as my cultural argument but close enough. Guess what, idiot? I can point out how those factors or similar ones are true for a comparison of every single Western country and America.

Except that other countries do not have Switzerland's defense dynamic, extraordinary socioeconomic arrangement, and gun ownership rate.

Other than that, yes I'm sure there are arguments to be made for each country....

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

but I'll address this anyway... so the Swiss are an outlier because they only have 9 million people and less poverty.

Not only do you downplay both of those factors (those are huge factors), but you missed an additional reason in the article.

Willingly, I'm guessing.

Originally Posted by AustinChief

So... let's look at other Western nations and find how many are even CLOSE to the US on either of those figures and throw the rest out of your data set. Fair? That's the rule you are applying here, shouldn't you be consistent with it?

Not even close, no. We are extremely similar (if not identical) to our Western brethren in culture and mental health.

We differ from them significantly in gun control. The Swiss may be in our ballpark, but the Swiss are a statistical and cultural aberration that render comparisons to them meaningless.

Originally Posted by AustinChief

By your logic, when Princess Di died, there was an epidemic of Royalty deaths.

Saul Good would be proud of this argument.

Originally Posted by AustinChief

I gave a line in the sand that makes sense and is a hard measurable metric.

And yet you back the NRA's efforts to keep the CDC from measuring it.

The irony is thicker than a Vietnamese jungle.

[RNR]

Originally Posted by luv

Oh, I don't own one, and I would never even consider purchasing one until I learned to shoot and knew about safety and maintenance. Since I don't think people should be able to purchase a gun without a recent gun safety course certificate, I would not purchase one without having one.

You have thought it through and that is good. Now just do some research and talk with knowledgable people to find the right gun for you and your needs. Good luck, have fun, be safe and hopefully you will never need it to defend yourself~

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

Yep, I was workin and wrapping gifts. And now I'm off to do Xmas with the family, someone else will have to pick on our resident MSNBC parrot for awhile.

That's the third time you've accused me of getting my research from the media.

This will be the third time I'll reiterate that my arguments largely mirror those of various police groups.

I fail to understand why that is difficult for you to grasp.

Rhetorical device, I guess.

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by Chief Gump

Answer his ****ing question.

?

[CoMoChief]

btw - most gun violence in America is gang violence in major inner cities shooting eachother.

If we ban guns or restrict them......that # will not go down.

[A Salt Weapon]

Originally Posted by CoMoChief

btw - most gun violence in America is gang violence in major inner cities shooting eachother.

If we ban guns or restrict them......that # will not go down.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

too bad the libs don't care, or they really are stupid enough to believe it will.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

This is wrong on two counts.

1. Because there is one exception to a rule does not discount the rule. It can and has been argued that the Swiss are an aberration based on the country's extraordinary socioeconomic factors and unique internal politics that aren't really duplicated anywhere else on earth (see prior piece from Business Insider).

2. It is much less likely that, to reduce our gun violence rates, we need to embrace policies closer to the vast majority of our Western brethren, other than the completely unrealistic goal of modeling ourselves after Switzerland.

Except that other countries do not have Switzerland's defense dynamic, extraordinary socioeconomic arrangement, and gun ownership rate.

Other than that, yes I'm sure there are arguments to be made for each country....

You again show immense stupidity and failure to follow the points I have made. you assume I want to use the Swiss as a model for something. I don't. I am pointing to the Swiss to show your premise is crap. That's it.

And I would argue that America is far more dissimilar to other Western countries than Switzerland is. Therefore it is MORE likely that America is the exception making your entire premise shit.

Your'e a hypocrite plain and simple. You say the Swiss can't be brought into the debate because they are a unique situation yet you steadfastly refuse to recognize that America is unique as well.

There really is no point in "debating" you since you have an idea in your head that won't be swayed by logic or FACTS no matter how many are thrown your way.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

Not only do you downplay both of those factors (those are huge factors), but you missed an additional reason in the article.

Willingly, I'm guessing.

The militia state part? Actually I was addressing the points you made in that response and YOU didn't mention it. Again, try to ****ing keep up. I'm happy to point out that it is a difference. I can also point to countless things that make America unique when compared to every one of your "Western" countries.

Originally Posted by Direckshun

Not even close, no. We are extremely similar (if not identical) to our Western brethren in culture and mental health.

We differ from them significantly in gun control. The Swiss may be in our ballpark, but the Swiss are a statistical and cultural aberration that render comparisons to them meaningless.

Dude, Santa didn't bring you a brain for Xmas obviously. I have NEVER said we are the same as the Swiss. You are trying to get people here to swallow the idea that teh Swiss are less like their Europeans neighbors than WE are. That is so ****ing ridiculous it's sad.

Originally Posted by Direckshun

Saul Good would be proud of this argument.

Nice dodge you ****ing weasel. You have stated that gun violence is an epidemic because millions of people like yourself are sad over Sandy Hook. My comparisons to Princess DI, the Shuttle Challenger, etc are all apt. It appears you think an epidemic is defined by media coverage and histrionics not by data. I gave a solid metric for when I would call gun violence an epidemic... please offer me YOUR definition. You have dodged and weaseled on it so far and have yet to offer anything remotely resembling an answer.

Originally Posted by Direckshun

And yet you back the NRA's efforts to keep the CDC from measuring it.

The irony is thicker than a Vietnamese jungle.

No, I don't back any such thing... because it doesn't ****ing happen and you are a ****ing tin foil hat wearing nutjob for thinking it does. I have shows fact after fact( not op-eds like you) proving this to be false but again, you have an agenda to push and you'll be damned if the pesky truth will get in the way.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

?

I gave a solid metric for when I would call gun violence an epidemic... please offer me YOUR definition. You have dodged and weaseled on it so far and have yet to offer anything remotely resembling an answer.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

That's the third time you've accused me of getting my research from the media.

This will be the third time I'll reiterate that my arguments largely mirror those of various police groups.

I fail to understand why that is difficult for you to grasp.

Rhetorical device, I guess.

Not your research, your opinions. I could care less where you claim to get your bogus "research." I find it impossible to believe you "thought up" your opinions on your own. Why? because no one who actually THINKS could possibly come to the insanely stupid conclusions you have spewed so far in this thread.

[AustinChief]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

I would argue against assault weapons because of their capacity for death, not their existence in any particular tragedy.

and you'd be just as ****ing wrong. (using US definition) an "assault" weapon is not necessarily any more deadly than the sport version of the same rifle.

How many ****ing times does this need to be explained to you?

Banning folding stocks, pistol grips and bayonet mounts don't have shit to do with "capacity for death"

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by CoMoChief

btw - most gun violence in America is gang violence in major inner cities shooting eachother.

If we ban guns or restrict them......that # will not go down.

Countries that allow citizens to arm themselves to the teeth are not any safer either.

Both sides just need to realize that more guns or less guns when promoted as a singular solution is a house of cards that easily collapse's with the slightest intellectual thought applied to the idea.