Posted on 04/29/2013 11:54:14 AM PDT by neverdem
With the presidents okay, the agency resumes business as usual.
In 1863 President Lincoln signed a congressional charter creating the National Academy of Sciences. Now, 150 years later, President Obama is enlisting NAS to implement an item in his January 16 plan to change the lives of Americas 100 million gun owners. He has directed the Centers for Disease Control to resume research on gun injuries and deaths, and the NASs Institute of Medicine (IOM) convened a public workshop last week specifically tasked with shaping the direction of the CDCs firearm research.
This weeks IOM workshop (which I attended via webcast) was moderated and mostly led by longtime anti-gun researchers. Weve suffered through 20 years, complained Jon Vernick, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg (yes, that Bloomberg) School of Public Health. He was referring to the period 16 years, actually since Congress cut off federal funding for his projects research on guns, which never seemed to find anything good about guns or gun owners.
David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and author of the book Private Guns, Public Health, claimed that we know very, very little about the deterrent effects of guns, even as criminologist Gary Kleck, an award-winning IOM committee member and the acclaimed author of the definitive research on that subject, looked on from the audience. Klecks work shows that many people use guns to defend against attackers every year.
Hemenways Harvard colleague Matthew Miller, an injury-control researcher with a medical degree, argued the case for using auto-injury-reduction measures as a model for reducing firearm injuries. He didnt say how this would work, since auto injuries are almost all accidental and firearm injuries are almost all intentional.
Julia da Silva, director of the Violence Prevention Office at the American Psychological Association, revealed the typical academic worldview, asserting that gun violence is an extreme expression of aggression and conflict resolution. To some, yes. To a career criminal, its just a way of getting what he wants. Ms. da Silva didnt even mention legitimate self-defense against such aggression as a use for a firearm.
In a personal note, National Institute of Justice director Greg Ridgeway fondly recalled his days as a RAND Corporation gun violence researcher, during which he collaborated with Garen Wintemute. Wintemute, a University of California emergency physician, has made a career of writing damning articles in medical journals about guns.
Ridgeway put the audience on notice that his agency has made research into user-authenticated guns which can be fired only by the designated lawful owner a priority. This technology sounds reasonable, no? But what if a homeowners spouse needs to use a gun to defend against a home invasion if the owner is injured? Or what if the guns verification software crashes?
The fact that this technology still doesnt exist after a decade of research hasnt stopped state legislators from making laws about it. A California senate committee just approved a bill that would make conventional guns illegal to sell if user-authenticated guns become a reality. If gun manufacturers decline to produce guns with this technology or to periodically shepherd it through Californias safe gun test hurdles, thats just too bad for Californias would-be gun owners.
The IOM workshop did allow a few voices from the pro-gun-rights side. The NRAs John Frazer gently reminded the assembled tweak-prone scientists that cost-benefit analyses of gun ownership are of limited value, since gun ownership is a fundamental right.
Any claims to objectivity were severely compromised by the absence of John Lott, the foremost researcher of the effects of gun ownership on crime. Lott has a long and distinguished academic career in firearm research, but he was not invited. It is not surprising that a group of academics who view guns as a modern scourge would disdain any contribution by Lott.
Overall, the workshop reflected the presidential mandate to restart the CDC gun-research machine: It was business as usual after a 16-year hiatus. The conferences leaders brought to the meeting their academics jaundiced view of guns as a dangerous virus to be studied with a view toward its control. Will Congress step in to enforce the law it wrote 16 years ago? If not, the CDC will work again to, in the words of former CDC gun research director Mark Rosenberg, persuade Americans to view guns as dirty, deadly and banned.
Timothy Wheeler, M.D., is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.
Oh Wonder of wonders , I can’t imagine what they will find !!
It sounds like the results of the “Global Warming “ agenda before they were presented with information showing ‘Global Cooling’,
and had to change their agenda to “Climate Change”.
A hand picked stacked deck will be as objective as The State Dept. Commission’s finding on Benghazi,
or the Just-Us Department investigation of “Fast and Furious”.
There is nothing like an agenda-driven investigation
and then the Libturd media will pick it up and run with it !
I think the Republican house should make a simple resolution to the CDC, that congress’s will on the subject is known, and that executive branch efforts to evade them will eventually result in punitive actions against those programs and individuals involved in them.
That is, “We will slash your budget and fire you”, if you do this. “We may not be able to do it immediately, but you had better prepare your resumes for when next the opportunity presents itself.”
Will they mention the millions of a time a year that law-biding citizens use a firearm to prevent themselves or their families from being seriously injured (or worse?)
All the people who were NOT wounded, NOT killed, NOT beaten, NOT raped, because they were armed.
Will the CDC or the National Academy of Sciences mention these people who were NOT statistics because they were armed?
I hear the sound of crickets.
He has directed the Centers for Disease Control to resume research on gun injuries and deaths,
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He has also given them their orders on what their results will be.
From the sound of things, he didn’t need to tell them what to find - they’re well on their way to reaching the expected conclusions. Results first, confirming research to follow.
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