A Public Health Approach and a Call to Action to End Gun Violence

A Public Health Approach and a Call to Action to End Gun Violence | Observer:
Ann Twomey is the founder and president of Health Professionals and Allied Employees (HPAE).

When public health advocates first proposed mandatory seat belts, or restrictions on sales of tobacco, some screamed that we were taking away their freedoms.  But years of reduction in car fatalities and tobacco use and related diseases have proven the advocates correct.  We need to tackle gun violence the same way, with research, education, prevention and common-sense reforms.

Ann,

Tobaco, cars these are not objects which save lives.   Firearms will always be with us, and most of the people who use them to take lives are criminals who will not be daunted by any law you can get passed.   Firearms have been used more often to save lives and property than to take lives; cars and tobacco are either a great convenience or a recognized vice.   They have not 'saved lives' as often as have firearms ... in defense of owners themselves; or homes, family, property.

 To address these and other critical questions, Congress must finally restore funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for gun violence research, which was cut off in 1996 at the behest of gun rights advocates. We need to let the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco (ATF) do its job, which is maintaining a centralized database on gun sales, tracking multiple sales, and working with other federal agencies to track the use of guns in violent incidents. Much of the traditional work of the ATF has been gutted in recent years due to lobbying by the NRA. Because of NRA lobbying, we aren’t doing research that could tell us how, when, where and by whom guns are acquired and used. 

Ann, that's a bald-faced lie, and you know it.

The NRA pointed out that the CDC was not doing its job; the CDC had a political agenda, and was slanting its reportage to suit its agenda ... not to educate the American public or to point the way to a better understanding of the way firearms fit in the American culture.  The leaders in the CDC had already decided that the NRA was not the way they wanted America to progress, so they did everything in their power to undermine the Second Amendment rights of Americans.

All on their own.

They can't even blame anyone else for influence; they (CDC) took full responsibility for their political Lies, Half-Lies, Omissions and Obfuscations.

When Congress investigated the NRA claims, they discovered that they were accurate; the CDC was violating the terms of its congressional mandate: they were not reporting the truth about guns; they were reporting a jaundiced and politically driven bias which had originated in the CDC ... not in an external agency.   That's why Congress demanded that ... while the CDC was free to research and report on any health-and-epidemiology issue they desired (which was the original charter ... NOT treating firearms as an "Epidemiological issue"), they could no longer receive federal funding for research which was deliberately slanted against civilian possession of firearms.

The CDC brought the slashing federal funding upon it-selves, so please do not blame the whistle-blowers!

We could test the truth of the claim that people who have guns in their homes gain protection from the weapons, rather than put family members at greater risk. We could also tell which state and local gun control measures are most effective and examine whether access to mental health services and bans on gun sales to those at risk of violent behavior would reduce incidents of gun violence.

Ann, you twit, that's exactly what CDC was originally mandated to do, and they demonstrated that they could not be objective were unwilling to do it when the issue of firearms ownership was involved.

Now you make this great heroic plea to allow the CDC to 'do its work', suggesting that without funding their hands are bound.

In truth, the CDC has recently received funding from the state of California to conduct a study (completed, I believe), to prove that firearms are harmful to American Society.  They did so, and the resulting report was less anarchaic than the reports which they submitted under Federal Funding.

I submit that the CDC has learned that biased 'scientific research reportage' is not part of a profitable future for them, at least under Federal Funding, and they are finding other funding.
(Not that the report doesn't sway toward the results which California was looking for.  A successful prostitute, once bought, stays bought.)

HONOR IS A SACRED thing, and once it has been compromised, it's almost impossible to regain.
The CDC has violated its own honor.  It has proven itself not worthy of the trust which once was its shield.

ABOUT ANN:

Ann. I've read your resume.
We are not swayed by your facile arguments.
When the CDC gave up it's integrity, America quit believing it.

There are few .. if any ... arguments you could make at this time to sway the taxpaying pubic.   Why should we support an agency which lies to us?

Perhaps someday the CDC will be less disingenuous.  Maybe someday we can trust them to look at BOTH sides of an issue (and that won't happen as long as CDC treats the second amendment as a 'cancer'!)

But this is not the day.
And yours is not the persuasive argument

And as long as you, with your thinly disguised quest for GUN CONTROL remain a spokesman for the renewed politicization of the CDC, it's unlikely that America will find it in its heart to accept the federal agency (which I, and every American, are paying for) as an agency whose reports we can trust, honor, and accept.

Trust is easy.    You expect it from your friends.

Trust, when violated, is nearly impossible. Your friends find it impossible.

The mere fact that time has passed since they (CDC) last time they stabbed us in the heart is insufficient grounds for us to accept the "common-sense reforms" which you have asked of us.

There is a crude, but appropriate, response  to the leniency which you have asked of us:

"Pound Sand"