Why Don’t We Study Gun Violence the Way We Study Car Accidents?

Policy on the prevention of violence tied to gun use is an “area that’s woefully inadequately based in actual evidence,” said Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Everybody is making things up.”

One big reason for the absence of such data is that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been operating for more than a decade under a virtual ban against doing the work. In the 1990s, the NRA persuaded Congress to pass legislation forbidding the CDC from using federal dollars to promote or advocate gun control. The restriction has been interpreted ever since to mean that no government research can be conducted on how guns affect health, placing an effective choke hold on any such work at the CDC.

The CDC points to a lack of dedicated funds as the reason it doesn’t do more work in this space. Shortly after the research ban was imposed, Congress yanked from its budget the amount it had been spending on gun violence research. But outside experts say the real issue is the intimidation of the scientific community. Mark Rosenberg, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that the CDC “has been terrorized by the NRA.”