On February 27 Breitbart News reported Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) were asking Obama for “$10 million” in funding so that gun violence research could start moving forward.
But a report the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC)–released February 26–shows that gun violence research has been booming apart from and without federal funding. In other words, it is inaccurate to claim that research will flounder or never start unless tax-payer monies are used to fund it.
Restriction on federally funded research took effect in 1997 and Obama lifted those restrictions in 2013. But the CPRC study shows that between 1997 and 2012, where one would assume a dearth of gun violence research because of the absence of public monies, what actually happened was that “research either remained constant or increased.”
And even with “increased funding restrictions in 2011, there has been a substantial increase in firearms research.”
At this same time, Micheal Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) claimed “academic publishing on firearm violence fell by 60 percent between 1996 and 2010.” But there is no evidence to support this claim. The CPRC report shows that “firearms research in medical journals did fall as a percentage of all research, but total research on firearms increased over that [same] time.”
With these things understood, Democrat requests for $10 million to kickstart gun violence research is better seen as a gun control slight of hand–it is a way to claim a problem that has not there in order to get tax-payer monies to fund a solution we do not need.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.