By Donna Leinwand Leger, USA TODAY
President Obama's demand Wednesday for research into gun violence
could usher in a flood of data on the nation's 32,000 annual gun deaths
after decades of an information blackout.
Scientists and policy
makers say they have little scientific data about gun violence after
Congress prohibited federal agencies, such as the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), from offering research grants to study anything that could be
used to promote gun control.
If Americans knew more about gun
violence, they would take steps to end it, says Mark Glaze, director of
Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
"That's the last thing the
Washington gun lobby wants," Glaze said. "To produce good public policy,
you need good data. The gun lobby has been working overtime to
blindfold public policy makers for a generation."
Federal health
agencies feared Congress would pull their funding if their research
offended the gun lobby, Glaze said. Obama's order eases that fear, Glaze
said.
"I think you'll see the research dollars flowing again," he said.
More
than 100 research scientists noted in a letter to Vice President Biden
that since 1973, the NIH has awarded three research grants to study more
than 4 million gun injuries while awarding 212 grants to study cholera
and 129 grants to study polio. Both illnesses have been nearly
eradicated in the United States.
Without federal support for
research, the scientists wrote in the Jan. 10 letter from the University
of Chicago Crime Lab, the nation will not have the information it needs
to tackle "one of the most pressing public health problems we currently
face."
The executive order signed Wednesday directs the CDC and
other federal agencies to research the "causes and prevention of gun
violence." The White House says such research is not prohibited by the
laws. Obama called gun deaths "a public health crisis" that warrants
epidemiological research.
Obama called on Congress to allocate
$10 million for additional research, including investigating the
relationship between violence and violent images in video games and
other media, and $20 million to expand the National Violent Death
Reporting System to all 50 states. The database of homicides and other
violent deaths now collects data from 18 states.
The end of
federal research into gun violence came in 1996 when Congress first
passed a National Rifle Association-backed amendment to a CDC
appropriations bill that prohibited spending federal dollars on research
that could be used to "advocate or promote gun control." The bill cut
$2.6 million from the CDC's National Center for Injury and Control.
Research
into gun violence dropped steadily. In 2012, the CDC spent $100,000 of
its $5.6 billion budget on gun injury research, a report from Mayors
Against Illegal Guns said.
The National Rifle Association did not
respond to a request for comment on the research order. In a written
statement, the gun rights group said it would focus on securing schools,
fixing the nation's mental health system and prosecuting violent
criminals.
"Attacking firearms and ignoring children is not a solution to the crisis we face as a nation," the NRA said.
More
restrictions on data came in 2003 when Congress passed legislation
sponsored by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., that barred the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from using n electronic
database to record gun sales.
Laws that prohibit the agency for
keeping an electronic database of gun sales also slow agents' ability to
trace guns used in crime, said retired ATF supervisory special agent
Mark Jones, now a senior law enforcement adviser for the University of
Chicago Crime Lab.
"You've got ATF with extremely limited
resources being forced to maintain a paper and pencil system so it has
to spend its limited resources are tracing firearms," Jones said. "It's
anachronistic."