BY Herschel Smith
10 years, 8 months ago
In what must certainly make her parents proud, Hannah Sparks recently wrote Guns are bad, m’kay? There isn’t time enough to address all of the inconsistencies and misrepresentations in the commentary, but one egregious error stands out.
Run-of-the-mill governmental corruption aside, the gun lobby wields its power in more insidious, blatantly harmful ways. One of its worst tactics is stymieing government research into gun violence from a public health perspective. The lobby’s first target was the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was conducting important data collection on gun violence in the mid-1990s.
Members of Congress allied with the gun lobby altered funding for the CDC in a way that explicitly prevented it from advocating for gun control. Recently, the National Institutes for Health has gotten similar treatment from Congressional Republicans for similar research. Funding for studies by public institutions like these is all but dry, and private researchers just can’t do the same kind of work as the CDC and NIH do.
Idiot Representative Keith Ellison sings the same tune in his recent interview with idiot Bill Maher. We’ve discussed this before, the notion that the gun lobby is preventing anything from happening concerning studies.
All the gun lobby managed to do is prevent your and my tax dollars from going to such research. The country is broke and we certainly can’t find a better way to cut wasteful spending.
As for the fact that “private researchers just can’t do the same kind of work as the CDC,” that’s just too damn bad. If there is a market for it, private industry or private individuals will find a way to fund it. Either way, you have a right to tax me for the common defense and building roads and bridges to enable interstate commerce. Beyond that, I see no constitutional basis for confiscation of my wealth for any government program.
For Hannah, don’t use words like m’kay in the title line. It evokes visions of stupid, gum-chomping girls.
