For decades, the Dickey Amendment prevented federal funding for the promotion of gun control. That’s literally all it did, but the people at the CDC took that to mean all research involving gun-related violence.
The fact that this suggested that such research only existed to promote gun control never seemed to enter the minds of the powers that be at the CDC.
Regardless, that’s yesterday’s news. The cap is off and now people like those powers that be can spend your tax dollars on studies however they want.
And, shockingly, more money going toward gun-crime research creates more studies.
A recent Yale-led study revealed that federal funding is a strong motivator for researchers to study gun violence and firearm injury prevention.
From 2017 to 2019, Congress awarded $30 million in funding to the CDC and NIH to study firearm injury prevention. But from 2020 to 2022, the federal legislature reappropriated federal funds and awarded the agencies approximately $150 million. The study, led by researchers from the School of Public Health, the School of Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Brown University, found that the number of clinical trials and research publications concerned with firearm prevention from the past three years increased by 90 percent compared to the previous period.
“This study brings light to the significant historical gap in funding for firearm injury prevention research, and the impact that a relatively small amount of federal funding can provide,” James Doddington, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the School of Medicine who did not participate in the study, wrote in an email to the News.“Importantly, it is studies like this that can assist policymakers in building the case for consistent federal funding and building national data infrastructure for understanding firearm injury over the lifespan.”
Literally no one is surprised to see that more money for research on a given topic leads to more studies being conducted on that topic. Academics are perpetually starved for grant money, or so it seems, so conducting studies isn’t surprising in the least.
What this study doesn’t do, however, is address the quality of the research being conducted.
Coming up on two years ago, Cam wrote about a piece that delved into the fact that gun control studies are basically worthless. They’re heavily biased and statistically, at least a few should have had “pro-gun” findings, even as outliers, and yet that didn’t happen.
That may well be because academics are self-censoring their results, knowing good and well that pro-gun findings might hurt their career.
So I have no doubt that there’s more research being conducted. What I don’t have any confidence in is that the research will be worth a bloody thing.
Money isn’t exactly known to induce integrity. In fact, it tends to illustrate people’s lack of it. With tax dollars now plentiful, biased researchers can now use our money to justify restricting our rights, and that’s a problem for obvious reasons.
Especially when those tax dollars could have gone for studies looking at how to short-circuit violence at the source.
But that’s too much like work for modern researchers, apparently.
