Taxpayer-Funded Advocacy

They say tigers don't change their stripes. The same may be true for public health officials. In 1994, the then- Director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control arrogantly betrayed the extent of the 'gun control' agenda. He's back, and he's done it again.

Doctor Mark Rosenberg told the Washington Post in 1994 that guns needed to be just like cigarettes: "dirty, deadly, and banned." His comments in that article, and the nakedly prejudiced "research" the CDC had funded, led to both his involuntary exit from the CDC and the Dickey Amendment. Neither stopped the publication of gun control research.

Congress authorized federal funding for "gun violence" research in 2019 and President Joe Biden has proposed doubling the appropriation to $50 million dollars for fiscal year 2022. The initial funding and the promise of even more has been celebrated by gun control researchers. The Journal of the American Medical Association ran what seemed initially to be a puff piece about funding and gun researchers "making up for lost time" that included comments from many prominent researchers.

Researchers like Doctor Garen Wintemute, who has been conducting firearms-related research since at least 1987 and has continued publishing since the Dickey Amendment. Wintemute now runs the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, which is funded by the state of California and provides grants to researchers. Wintemute has also spent more than a million dollars of his own money funding his gun control research.

Doctor Megan Ranney of Brown University was also quoted. Ranney published her first firearm-related research paper in 2006, shortly after she completed medical school, and has similarly not been stymied by the Dickey Amendment. Ranney is the Chief Research Officer of the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, an organization that provides research grants. She received just under $650,000 from the CDC for the first year of a three-year project. .....