Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Congress retains ban on CDC promoting gun control

House Dems lose fight to nix gun research ban in budget | TheHill:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has come up empty in her efforts to eliminate a budget rider that has halted nearly all government research into gun violence for 17 years.

That "budget rider" was known as the Dickey Amendment, which I discussed a few days ago in an article titled "Why We Can't Trust The CDC With Gun Research".

Here's some more information on the Dickey Amendment:

[...] The 1993 NEJM article received considerable media attention, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) responded by campaigning for the elimination of the center that had funded the study, the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention. The center itself survived, but Congress included language in the 1996 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill (PDF, 2.4MB) for Fiscal Year 1997 that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”  Referred to as the Dickey amendment after its author, former U.S. House Representative Jay Dickey (R-AR), this language did not explicitly ban research on gun violence. However, Congress also took $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget — the amount the CDC had invested in firearm injury research the previous year — and earmarked the funds for prevention of traumatic brain injury.

Given that the Rabid AntiGunRights .... uh .... Congresscritter Nancy Pelosi refused to draw a line in the sand over this issue, it appears that even she acknowledges there is some truth to the original claim that the CDC has proven it can't be trusted to be neutral on the subject of Gun Control.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes congress does something right.