Former congressman Jay Dickey (R-Arkansas) says he regrets legislation that he sponsored 20 years ago that has restricted federal funding for research into gun violence. When the original bill to shut down the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention failed, Dickey then introduced an alternate that prohibited agency funds being "used to advocate or promote gun control.” It passed and has been the law for 20 years now.
Even though it didn't specifically ban research, it has been interpreted as such by later politicians who wanted to do the NRA's bidding -- and by the CDC out of fear that such research would jeopardize any of their research on injury prevention.
Dickey says he didn't intend to stop research, just to stop what seemed politically motivated advocacy. He now thinks: "If we had somehow gotten the research going, we could have somehow found a solution to the gun violence without there being any restrictions on the Second Amendment."
congressional Republicans. In 2011 they further extended the restrictions to include the entire National Institutes of Health, claiming that "a gun is not a disease."
Since the 2012 Newtown school shooting that killed 20 kids and 6 staff, President Obama has instructed federal agencies to interpret the Dicky amendment literally -- as a restriction on funds for advocacy, not on funds for research.
Let's see what happens now following the Oregon shooting -- and with Obama's greater freedom to act boldly, since he no longer has to worry about getting re-elected. He has said he will use the full extent of his executive powers, and it sounds like he may have some in this.
Ralph
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