Are Democrats Afraid Of Gun Control? Not Any More.
Last night’s Democratic Presidential debate had to register
joyous excitement within the ranks of Gun-control Nation because the candidates
spent 15 minutes trotting out their various ideas about how to reduce violence
caused by guns. Remember when gun control was verboten as a campaign
issue on the Democratic side? Ain’t true
no more, that’s for sure.
Booker rolled out his plan for national gun licensing,
Warren admitted to voting for an assault-rifle ban, Castro said he had no
problem with some gun buybacks, on and on. Where they all come down on the same
side, however, is restoring CDC gun-research funding, an item that has been
stripped from the CDC budget every year since 1997, but which this year has been
stuck back into the House version
of the budget to the tune of $50 mil.
Before I say what I am about to say, let me make it
perfectly clear that I have no problem with research being done on any health
issue, particularly an issue which results in more than 125,000 fatal and
non-fatal injuries every year. But let me also make it clear that while my
Ph.D. research was on economic history, not gun violence, I know a little bit
about the requirements for conducting academic research, and certain requirements
remain true whether the research covers gun violence or the 16th-century
origins of capitalism, which happened to be my field.
Those requirements include the following: (1). The data
used for the research must be valid and must be directly relevant to the topic
at hand; (2). The problem being solved must be defined by its importance to the
specific field of inquiry, not by whether data exists which can be properly
used. Unfortunately, much of the research
which comes out of the public health research community on gun violence doesn’t
meet either of those requirements, and this is not because there hasn’t been enough
research money to go around.
Public health gun researchers love to talk about their
work as a contribution to the ‘epidemiology’ of gun violence, you can find this
nomenclature in the work of leading gun-violence scholars here.
Now I always thought that the term ‘epidemiology’ means that one identifies a threat
to health, figures out how it spreads from host to host, and then figures out
how to immunize or protect the not-yet-infected population from contracting the
disease. But in the case of gun violence, the disease doesn’t spread from victim
to victim, the disease is caused because someone picks up a gun and shoots themselves
or someone else. And we can’t study this population because either they are not
about to admit what they have done, or in the case of suicide, they happen to
be dead. That’s a big problem with guns. The rate of fatal injury is much higher
than what happens if you fall off your bike.
Virtually all the gun-violence research published since
the CDC ban took effect is based either on CDC injury data which covers the victims
of gun violence who do not play a primary role in the spread of this disease,
or is based on telephone surveys which, by definition, exclude participation by
the shooters themselves. Does it really
matter that most gun owners support
background checks for secondary gun transfers when these same gun owners have
little, if any direct responsibility for the violence caused by guns? Our
friend Philip Cook
interviewed an incarcerated population about how and why they carried guns,
but he wasn’t about to ask them to explain the circumstances in which they
actually used a gun.
I hope CDC gun research starts up again so that my
friends in the gun research community receive the financial resources they
deserve. If they do, then they need to figure out how and why less than five
percent of the people who commit violent assaults each year use a gun. And that’s
not going to change no matter how many laws we pass to regulate the behavior of
law-abiding folks who own guns.
