Posted on 01/06/2022 9:53:25 AM PST by KeyLargo
Trust the Science?
by Jason Ouimet, Executive Director, NRA-ILA - Monday, December 6, 2021
Tucked away in the NRA-ILA archives is an Atlanta Constitution article from April 20, 1975. Titled, “Life-Style Disease: Atlanta’s CDC Plans to Examine Ways People Make Themselves Sick,” the item doesn’t mention firearms, but details how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to expand its role beyond controlling actual communicable diseases like polio and smallpox and into all manner of personal conduct.
The Atlanta Constitution item assured readers, "The CDC itself by no means has plans to go out and force people to change life-styles. It will only act as a catalyst and clearing house for other interested agencies and organizations to help develop the concept that people would only have to change their ‘life-styles’ a little to be healthier."
However, within a decade, the CDC was attempting to take a central role in Americans’ lives. This included attempts to dictate one of their most personal decisions—how to protect themselves and their families.
In 1983, the CDC established its Violence Epidemiology Branch, which set forth to apply a “public-health approach” to what are more appropriately understood as criminal justice matters. Under this new rubric, firearms would be treated akin to germs transmitting a communicable disease.
In the December 1984 issue of Science, the CDC expressed its interest in targeting gun ownership. A CDC staffer who insisted on anonymity lamented, “Because of the Reagan administration’s anti-gun-control stance, the CDC has tiptoed around the issue of gun control.” Making clear the agency’s desire to attack firearms, the source added, “The violence branch is in a fledgling state. If it steps too hard on the gun issue, it would be squashed in a heartbeat.”
Sniffing out the CDC’s motives from the start, NRA Information and Member Services characterized the article’s contents by explaining, “After losing numerous legislative fights in the gun control battle, handgun control groups now are trying an end-run political tactic in a new area—public health policy.”
The CDC’s false timidity didn’t last long. Amidst a period of elevated violent crime, the federal government held the Surgeon General’s Workshop on Violence and Public Health in late October 1985. In 1986, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a report on the workshop that contained the policy recommendations of the various “work groups” at the conference. CDC Violence Epidemiology Branch chief Mark L. Rosenberg served as the “Advisory Committee Member” on the “Assault and Homicide: Prevention” work group.
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Science is trustworthy. Scientists not so much.
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