“Days after the inauguration, White House directives and pledges to cut public health funding are already causing chaos and uncertainty,” The Trace, a self-identified news source on “gun violence” funded by, among other sources, Everytown for Gun Safety, but claiming “editorial independence” asserts. “Experts say this is just the beginning.”
A primary “expert” consulted is Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of “Violence Prevention” at UC Davis. That’s a name familiar to longtime readers of The War on Guns blog who will recall a 2007 post that alerted gun owners he was attending gun shows with hidden cameras and recorders and reportedly training his followers to monitor transactions and call the police. It included a photo of him and the recommendation “WARNING! IF YOU SEE THIS MAN, NOTIFY SECURITY IMMEDIATELY.”
This resulted in Wintemute telling Slate it was a “Wanted” poster, and “federal law enforcement agents recommended that I wear a ballistic vest.” The hysteria did not stop there; the “science” journal Nature incorrectly told its readers I had “outed” a man who had outed himself and ultimately felt compelled to issue a retraction (albeit an incomplete one). (Note: The links in this paragraph go to articles saved in the Internet Archive and may load very slowly.)
The subjective hyperbole continues in The Trace’s article:
For decades, researchers, physicians, and epidemiologists were stymied in their efforts to study gun violence as a public health issue, a link that was first made in the late 1970s. The CDC began funding gun violence research in the 1990s, as the rates of firearm homicide and suicide spiked, but lobbying by the National Rifle Association led to the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which effectively halted federal dollars for the research. It wasn’t until 2019 that Congress struck a bipartisan deal jointly awarding the NIH and CDC an annual $25 million to study gun violence. [“Bipartisan”—thanks, “Republicans”!]
But that’s the narrative that dominates the search engines, that the powerful obstructionist NRA stopped “gun violence research,” and readers using Google to search will be hard pressed to find that’s not a true representation: The amendment didn‘t stop research, it merely precluded the use of CDC funds for gun control advocacy:
“None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.”
What The Trace is not telling its readers is why that was necessary.
Regular readers should recall “retired neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, medical editor and author, medical historian and medical ethicist, public health critic and advocate for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. In his landmark “The Perversion of Science and Medicine (Part III): Public Health and Gun Control Research,” he documented how the government was casting objectivity aside and abusing its authorized purposes with naked political agenda promotion masked as “science”:
Dr. Mark Rosenberg, Director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Control and Prevention (NCIPC) in 1994 told The Washington Post: “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. Now it [sic] is dirty, deadly, and banned.”
So, it’s no surprise that the prospect of a Trump administration no longer playing that game with federal funds results in howls of outrage, that the gun prohibitionists will now have to foot the bill for their own propaganda:
These actions are a direct attack on science — not just health, but science in general,” said Joseph Richardson, an anthropologist and epidemiologist at the University of Maryland who has studied gun violence for more than 20 years. “You can slowly see the pendulum shifting back towards treating [gun violence] as a law enforcement problem.”
If it really is a “public health problem,” it’s remarkably contained. As author, economist and Crime Prevention Research President John Lott has demonstrated:
“Murders in United States are very concentrated, and they are becoming even more so. Most counties experience no murders, a smaller subset of counties where there are a few murders, and then a minuscule subset of counties where murders are very common. Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas, and even in those counties, murders are concentrated in small areas inside them.”
Rather than heeding reality, expect the junk science purveyors and their elitist-funded “independent” propagandists to continue whining and to resume their politically motivated perversions of medical science.
It’s enough to make me want to come up with some more “Wanted” posters.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
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