128 physicians get it wrong

There is a letter to the editor in today's Tennessean newspaper, jointly submitted by 128 named physicians, "Gun violence is a national public health emergency." It is written from their hearts and their earnestness cannot be denied.

Unfortunately, they get it wrong on the main (maybe only) point they raise about reducing the number of people killed or injured by gunfire:

Unfortunately, research on gun violence is currently sparse due to restrictive congressional bills and a lack of adequate funding.

Specifically, the Dickey Amendment, passed by Congress in 1996, has severely limited critical research on guns and gun violence. 

At the same time as this amendment was passed, Congress also cut millions of dollars previously dedicated to gun violence research from the budget of the Centers for Disease Control.

This is factually false. The Dickey Amendment was passed by Congress in 1996 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Wikipedia: "... the Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1996 federal government omnibus spending bill which mandated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control" (my italics). It passed in the House by 263-158 (including then-Rep. Bernie Sanders voting with the majority).

There was and remains nothing in the law that inhibits the CDC from conducting research into gun-violence as a public-health issue, nor any other federal agency. If that was the case, how did the CDC, under directive from President Obama, release a study in 2013 that was specifically ordered by the president in his Presidential Memorandum of January 2016, “Engaging in Public Health Research on the Causes and Prevention of Gun Violence”?

The heart of the memo is this:

Therefore, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:

Section 1. Research. The Secretary of Health and Human Services (Secretary), through the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services, shall conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it. The Secretary shall begin by identifying the most pressing research questions with the greatest potential public health impact, and by assessing existing public health interventions being implemented across the Nation to prevent gun violence. [Italics added]

The study was done by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council and was completed in June of that and is online. So did President Obama order HHS and CDC to break the law or might it be that the political voices decrying the Dickey Amendment's prohibition of politically-oriented gun-related papers are denouncing it because, well, they want politically-oriented CDC products?

Another case: Just last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a new study from researchers at the Centers for Disease Control entitled “Childhood Firearm Injuries in the United States.” Again, did the CDC break the law, this time under Trump's presidency?

In fact, there is no law prohibiting the CDC from researching gun violence in the United States. What the Dickey amendment did was prohibit research by the CDC that was intended to support a political agenda or certain legislation. In other words, the CDC may not become a political arm of the government, but must remain an objective research agency.

A former CDC public-health doctor, Seema Yasmin, now a Stanford University professor, wrote after Parkland, "I worked at the CDC and if it really wanted to, it could study gun violence." She also wrote in The Dallas Morning News that Congress would still have to authorize funds for such studies -- which the Trump administration has already said should be done.

Besides, this country is already awash in studies about guns in America. Just this year, the Rand Corporation issued its report in which it said it reviewed "thousands of studies." So the idea that we know nothing useful about guns and their effects because the CDC isn't doing reporting on it is simply not a credible one to make.

Error number two in the letter: The Congress did not cut CDC funding by $2.6 million. That was the amount of money allocated away from politically-oriented research and transferred to traumatic-brain injury research. In fact, the CDC's funding tripled from 1996 to 2010 and exceeds $6 billion today. It is hardly gasping for money.

There is quite enough heat in the gun debates in America now, but the whole issue would be much better served with more light and less heat. Facts matter.