Summary: Reporter Sheila Kaplan present the statement “Guns in home protect families” as the National Rifle Association’s mantra. According to Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who headed research on firearm violence at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the 1990s, when they did a study they found that bringing a gun into the home increased the risk for everyone in the home. The findings from this study were disputed by the NRA and in 1995 the NRA successfully lobbied congress to stop CDC funding for research on gun violence. Since then efforts to understand why people shot themselves or others have been largely abandoned at the federal level. Following the Parkland school shooting, the secretary for health and human services, Alex M. Azar II stated that he thought the CDC should resume studying gun violence but did not provide particulars on how this would occur. Kaplan lists a number of questions that have been left unanswered such as “who is most likely to use a gun in a crime, and where does the gun come from?” Kaplan goes on to explore in more detail how the lack of studies has left us with a limited understanding of the tradeoff between childhood deaths and self-defense. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded some research on gun violence including studies on accidental deaths among children, adolescents and war veterans. The Justice Department also funds some research on gun violence. A roadblock to gun violence research are the Tiahrt Amendments. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are prevented from sharing their firearms tracking data bases with anyone outside of law enforcement. However, this may all be changing. Kaplan goes over possible increases in funding for research that may occur next year. The CDC did receive money for expanding its surveillance of gun deaths done through the National Violent Death Reporting System.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/health/gun-violence-research-cdc.html?smid=pl-share
mass shooting thread in full effect. im sure someone will still make a school/location specific thread tho. but I'm kinda glad this got made.