A group of Democrats from the House and Senate have announced a new bill that would give researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds to conduct studies on gun safety and firearms violence.
Proposed by Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the bill would give $10 million annually to the CDC for the next six years.
“Gun violence is ending lives and shattering families in Massachusetts and across the country,” said Markey. “Now more than ever we must study the causes of gun violence and what can be done to prevent it. No one should be afraid of more non-partisan, scientific research into this vital issue – not Republicans, not the NRA, and not President Trump.”
The bill has backing from some of the top gun control organizations in the country, including Everytown for Gun Safety, the Brady Campaign, and Moms Demand Action.
A spokesperson for the Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown group said the bill was a long time coming.
“Gun violence kills more than 90 Americans and injures hundreds more each day, and yet it remains one of the most underfunded areas of public health research,” said Everytown research director Sarah Tofe in a statement. “The legislation introduced today would appropriate necessary and long overdue funds to the CDC to reclaim their leadership when it comes to gun violence prevention research – a role that has been decimated for more than two decades thanks to a relentless campaign by gun lobby-backed legislators.”
This effort is not a new one; in fact, Markey and Maloney themselves have backed similar legislation for the last three years running. And this one will fail as those attempts did. Not because Republicans are eaten up by the gun lobby, but because this is a transparent ploy by anti-gun Democrats to put some extra “credibility” behind their biased research studies.
There are plenty of privately-funded organizations out there doing massive gun violence studies already, but their work is subject to skepticism because they tend to show exactly what their benefactors want them to show. By taking research out of private hands and putting it into the framework of the federal government, Democrats are hoping to convince Americans that all the politicization and bias is gone. And that, of course, is ludicrous.
Democrats don’t want the truth; they want the CDC to act as a rubber stamp for the research of Everytown, MDA, and other left-wing advocacy groups. They want gun control, period.
