For years, the Dickey Amendment was held up as the reason why federal tax dollars couldn’t be used to fund gun research. Strangely, plenty of it still happened, but it wasn’t funded by the feds.
Then things changed and suddenly, the Dickey Amendment wasn’t a thing anymore, at least as it applied to research on violent crime.
The issue now, though, is that the Trump administration isn’t exactly winning friends and influencing people among the gun research community, and as David Codrea notes over at Ammoland, they kind of brought it on themselves.
The subjective hyperbole continues in The Trace’s article:
For decades, researchers, physicians, and epidemiologists were stymied in their efforts to study gun violence as a public health issue, a link that was first made in the late 1970s. The CDC began funding gun violence research in the 1990s, as the rates of firearm homicide and suicide spiked, but lobbying by the National Rifle Association led to the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which effectively halted federal dollars for the research. It wasn’t until 2019 that Congress struck a bipartisan deal jointly awarding the NIH and CDC an annual $25 million to study gun violence. [“Bipartisan”—thanks, “Republicans”!]
But that’s the narrative that dominates the search engines, that the powerful obstructionist NRA stopped “gun violence research,” and readers using Google to search will be hard pressed to find that’s not a true representation: The amendment didn‘t stop research, it merely precluded the use of CDC funds for gun control advocacy:
“None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.” […]
— Read More: bearingarms.com
