Hartford Courant:

Silence never solved complex national problems. Yet some spineless lawmakers put special interests ahead of the public even to the point of discouraging and shutting off discussion of important public issues.

This is nothing new. Congress imposed a gag order from 1836 to 1844 on the overriding issue of the 19th century, refusing to accept any and all “petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions or papers relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery.” It was unconstitutional, draconian and finally ended because a few congressmen fought it every day.

Gun violence in America is another critical public issue, but Congress has for nearly 20 years found a way to silence government researchers by using the power of the purse to intimidate the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After the terrible murders in Newtown three years ago, President Barack Obama signed an executive order directing the CDC to resume gun research. The CDC still hasn’t, but it must — despite congressional threats from the majority Republicans.

The bullying started in 1996, when the CDC released studies that researched the risk factors that led to gun violence.

One study found that just having a gun in the home was associated with a nearly 300 percent increase in the likelihood that it would be used to murder someone in the house. The likelihood that someone in the house would use a gun to commit suicide was even higher — 500 percent.

Then the National Rifle Association swung into action, complaining that the CDC was using public funds to push gun control and ask political questions. The Republican-controlled Congress cut CDC funds by the exact amount used to study gun-related violence and prohibited researchers from using public funds to advocate for gun control.

This put researchers in a bind: If they did open-ended, scientifically sound research that, say, examined what local regulations were most effective in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, Congress would accuse them of breaking the rules and would punish the CDC by slashing its budget.

The threats did what the weapons manufacturers wanted, dropping a curtain of silence on guns.

This is a piece of work.  Slavery and guns are brought up as if there’s some analogous feature.  Debunked “studies” are cited, emotional, draconian terms are invoked (silence, slashing, prohibited, etc.), and then finally, the NRA is blamed for it all.

Here are the facts.  Many NRA members lose patience with the NRA because we see it as too progressive and willing to compromise in its rating system.  The real enemy of progressives is gun owners, even though they don’t know it.  They still see gun owners as a monolithic group, controlled and told what to think by the NRA.  Independent-minded thinking never occurs to progressives because they don’t work that way.

No one has prohibited anyone from studying whatever they want.  What Congress did was prohibit the spending of tax dollars for studies that first of all, would likely be used to press for political ends, and second, should never be funded by the government anyway.  Many gun owners would assert that the government has a constitutional right to raise monies for the common defense, and not much else.  The only reason such a thing comes up with the CDC is because government spending is out of control.

I strongly recommend that the folks at the CDC – and anywhere else for that matter – study whatever they want, on their own dollars and on their own time.  There is no moratorium on such studies (they’re not illegal), just on using my money for them.  I don’t get to take your money and study how to make M855 ammunition more effective, and you don’t get to take mine and throw it away on “studies” I don’t sanction.  That’s fair enough.

Todd Frankel blogging at The Washington Post:

So what does the study say?

It’s hefty, running 121 pages. The title is “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.” The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine and National Research Council published it in 2013.

And the study clearly makes the case for why more gun-violence research is needed.

The CDC requested the study to identify research goals after Obama issued his January 2012 executive order. The National Academies’s study authors clearly see gun violence as a problem worth examining:  “By their sheer magnitude, injuries and deaths involving firearms constitute a pressing public health problem.”

The authors suggested focusing on five areas: the characteristics of firearm violence, risk and protective factors, interventions and strategies, gun safety technology and the influence of video games and other media. The document is peppered with examples of how little we know about the causes and consequences of gun violence — no doubt the result of an 18-year-old CDC research ban.

But gun-rights supporters zeroed on in a few statements to make their case. One related to the defensive use of guns. The New American Magazine article noted that “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

So it would appear the “good use” of guns outweighs the “bad use.” That may be true, except the study says all of those statistics are in dispute — creating, in the study authors’ eyes, a research imperative.

You can read the whole post for yourself.  I’ve lifted the money quotes out (and hopefully not out of context).  Mr. Frankel charges gun-rights activists with an error in interpretation of data and statistics, and whether Mr. Frankel is correct in his own interpretation or not is irrelevant.  The Germane point is that gun rights activists – if they are indeed using such data and statistics to demonstrate a point – are in error for simply using the data, not for misinterpreting it.

We’ve discussed this before.  I’ve made the point that “what happens to society at the macroscopic level is immaterial.  My rights involve me and my family, and don’t depend on being able to demonstrate that the general health effects in society are not a corollary to or adversely affected by the free exercise of them.  It’s insidious and even dangerous to argue gun rights as a part of crime prevention based on statistics because it presupposes what the social planners do, i.e., that I’m part of the collective.”  I object to John Lott’s procedure, and have stated frequently that I do not believe in the second amendment.  I believe in God.  The Almighty grants me the rights to be armed, and when the Almighty has spoken, it is eternal law for all men everywhere and in all ages and epochs.  See also Holding Human Rights Hostage To Favorable Statistical Outcomes, and Kurt Hoffman on the same subject.

There is probably little constitutional basis for such a thing as the Centers for Disease Control at the expense of our tax dollars even when studying diseases.  But there is certainly none whatsoever for its existence when it pens studies for the express intent of infringing on God-given rights.  If gun rights activists are arguing statistics with the collectivists, that’s the mistake right there.  Full stop.  Don’t do that.  Ever.  You presuppose their world view when you do that.