In the United States, there are not only restrictions on studying Black Studies, classic literature, accurate history, and science. More than 40,000 people were killed with gun violence in 2023, an average of 118 deaths each day, many in Texas. Black people are almost fourteen times as likely to die from firearms as whites. Half of all deaths of Blacks aged 15 to 19 in 2021 were from guns. However, due to a single statement made by a Republican supporter of the NRA in the congressional budget bill of 1996, we are left in the dark regarding the reasons behind and methods to prevent the ongoing violence. This particular sentence states that “None of the funds allocated for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are permitted to be utilized for the advocacy or promotion of gun control.” As a result, the necessary understanding and strategies to address this issue remain elusive.
A similar provision is in the Appropriations Act of 2012. Today CDC’s policy interprets this language as a warning against using CDC funds to research gun issues that could be used in legislative arguments “intended to restrict or control the purchase or use of firearms,” leaving researchers reluctant to study remedies lest their projects become unfunded. For nearly 30 years that amendment has prevented the CDC’s study of gun violence. Mass shootings account for one consequence of gun violence. Suicide, urban gun violence victimizing young minority men, family shootings, police shootings all have different risk factors, different motives, and frequently engage different fi rearms. Like cancer, there is no single cure for the epidemic of gun violence in the United States.
If cancer research had been eliminated in 1996 malignancies now curable would still be deadly, but because of research hundreds of cancers now have known preventions and treatments. Firearm violence is epidemic for multiple reasons and similarly requires numerous scientific research methods. After every mass shooting, after every individual family’s loss, desperate pleas pour in from citizens for officials to do something, anything, to address the scourge of gun violence. President Obama ordered the CDC to examine “the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it” in 2012, but the CDC has unfailingly refused to apportion resources to the issue. Republicans, in thrall to the National Rifle Association, continue to promote amendments to cut federal funding for CDC gun research, making guns our least researched cause of death even though they are a prominent cause.
