Evaluating the National Rifle Association’s “stranglehold on science”
Firearms line the walls of a Las Vegas gun range in 2007.
Cory Doctorow, CC BY-SA 2.0
A January Journal of the American Medical Association article called US gun-violence research “substantially underfunded and understudied.” A February article in the American Journal of Public Health observed that roadway deaths have substantially declined thanks to measures suggested by research, in contrast to “a paucity of research about ways … to mitigate mortality and morbidity caused by firearms.” In the general media as well, arguments for federal gun-violence research have been lurking. Now the Las Vegas concert massacre has refocused the attention.
Much of the attention goes to the Dickey Amendment, a provision in a 1996 statute named for Republican congressman Jay Dickey of Arkansas. It doesn’t actually forbid federal gun-violence research. It merely directs that “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.” But the Dickey Amendment has intimidated federal research officials at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health ever since.
Firearms and public health
Does gun-violence research really invite or portend gun control? Many on the political right think so. Consider the 2011 New York Times article “NRA stymies firearms research, scientists say.” It quoted National Rifle Association chief lobbyist Chris Cox: “Our concern is not with legitimate medical science. Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.” Late this summer, Science magazine quoted another NRA lobbyist’s concern that federal involvement means that “political agendas are allowed to supersede scientific analysis.”
The Times‘s 2011 article noted that the Dickey “prohibition is striking, firearms researchers say, because there are already regulations that bar the use of CDC money for lobbying for or against legislation. No other field of inquiry is singled out in this way.”
Newsweek‘s headline after Las Vegas illustrated the nearly universal tone of current press attention to the research issue. It exclaimed, “The government won’t fund research on gun violence because of NRA lobbying.” A Times editorial charged that Washington has “hobbled basic research into what is clearly a public health disaster.” Articles and commentaries along such lines appeared at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , the Philadelphia Inquirer , the Huffington Post , and elsewhere .
In an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed , Mark L. Rosenberg, founding director of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, warned that “we are asking lawmakers to make decisions without data.” He stipulated that we “need to find things that work to both reduce gun violence and protect gun rights.” He reported that CDC “houses the largest collection of violence prevention professionals of any place in the world.” After observing that automobile safety research has saved more than a third of a million lives “without banning cars,” he asserted that investments in “gun violence prevention research through CDC can yield results that are every bit as impressive.”
At the Los Angeles Times in 2016 and again after Las Vegas, Pulitzer Prize–holding columnist Michael Hiltzik, rejecting the notion that the Dickey Amendment constitutes an actual block to research, condemned what he called “a succession of pusillanimous CDC directors.” He charges that they “decided that the safest course bureaucratically was simply to zero out the whole field.” He advocates forcing an end to what he calls the NRA’s “stranglehold on science.”
Citing Rosenberg’s views, Hiltzik got specific about what’s needed:
Rosenberg and other experts list four topics on which research is crucial. First is the scale of the problem—how many people are shot, is the number rising or falling, who gets shot, under what circumstances, and with what weapons? Second, what are the causes? “What leads people to shoot other people or kill themselves?” Rosenberg asked. (Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides, he said.)
Third is learning what works to prevent gun violence, and fourth is figuring out how to translate these findings into policy. Legislators across the country have enacted laws allowing open-carry of firearms on the street or in public places, or authorizing teachers to carry arms in the classroom or on campus, “with no idea whether that would result in more people being killed or more lives being saved,” Rosenberg said.
Health experts also have been urging NIH to renew its lapsed research program. Weeks before Las Vegas, Science magazine summarized that situation:
Four years after then-President Barack Obama responded to the shooting deaths of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, by ordering US health agencies to sponsor gun research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has let lapse a funding program probing firearm violence and how to prevent it, Science has learned. Renewal of the program, which has funded 22 projects for $18 million over the past 3 years, “is still under consideration,” a NIH spokesperson said on 6 September, although the agency stopped accepting proposals in January and the last new awards are now being launched.
After Las Vegas, in an 11 October letter reported by The Hill and others , 24 Democratic senators called it “critical” that NIH “dedicate a portion of its resources to the public health consequences of gun violence.”
Bypassing the bureaucracy
The overall situation inspires press attention to Garen Wintemute , the emergency-room physician and professor who directs the new, state-funded Firearm Violence Prevention Research Center at the University of California, Davis.
Wintemute’s 2015 paper in Annual Review of Public Health summarized firearm violence’s basic epidemiology. It opened by showing that over a recent decade, US firearm deaths outnumbered American combat deaths in World War II. Until late in the last century, such deaths had been seen not as a public health issue, but as issues in criminology, mental health, or public safety. The paper quoted a question from a pre–Dickey Amendment New York Times 1993 profile of David Satcher, then the new CDC director: “Violence is the leading cause of lost life in this country today. If it’s not a public health problem, why are all those people dying from it?” Wintemute’s paper conveyed this main message: “Evidence-based interventions may lead to substantial reductions in death and disability from this important public health problem.”
But Wintemute draws press attention for something more than his science: his long-evolving moral stature for conducting it. Fortune‘s Wintemute-centered article “The Las Vegas shooting: A public health crisis” reported that by year’s end, he will have contributed a total of $2.1 million of his own money to his research program. Nature‘s lengthy 2013 profile reported on his gun marksmanship as a youth, his adult membership in the NRA and a local gun club, and his work a third of a century ago in Cambodia’s Nong Samet Refugee Camp. In that area recently liberated from the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot, Wintemute treated wounds from gunshots and landmine shrapnel. “There was no electricity,” Nature noted, “and amputations were done under local anaesthetic.”
Nature also reported on Wintemute’s visits to gun shows to gather information:
At his first show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the signs used to advertise guns caught his attention. One licensed retailer displayed a Mossberg Model 500 shotgun with a pistol grip next to a poster that read “Great for Urban Hunting”. Another sign, beside a Savage rifle, read: “Great for Getto [sic] Cruisers”.
Wintemute says that he was astonished by the blatant promotion of guns as murder weapons. “It was clearly a story that had to be told—bearing witness is part of the job—but I wanted to figure out a way to tell the story quantitatively, scientifically.”
It took several years of trial and error at shows before he was confident enough of his methods to begin collecting data. He cut off his waist-length ponytail so he would not stand out in the crowds, bought a small camera and placed it in a bag of Panda liquorice with a lens-sized hole cut in the side. A pen and notepad would attract too much notice, so he set up his office voicemail so that he could call it from his mobile phone and record long messages. He later added a video camera disguised to look like a button on his shirt.
Several times, Wintemute was accused of taking unauthorized photos, and his phone was temporarily confiscated by security personnel, who examined it and found no pictures. After one such episode, he says, a colleague overheard a group of men planning to attack Wintemute outside the show, but Wintemute successfully avoided them.
Altogether, he attended 78 gun shows in 19 states, strolling the aisles while apparently deep in a phone conversation.
Wintemute isn’t alone in demonstrating hope for this research. On Christmas Day in 2015, the Washington Post placed online the two-author op-ed “How to protect gun rights while reducing the toll of gun violence.” It declared, “Both of us now believe strongly that federal funding for research into gun-violence prevention should be dramatically increased.”
Note that adverb now. One author was former National Center for Injury Prevention and Control director Rosenberg. The other was former congressman Dickey.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.