Gun Violence Prevention
It’s Easy, Just Lock Up The Criminals
The Trump administration has cut staff at the CDC, thus making
it tougher for the agency to conduct research supporting gun control.
The revolver in this image doesn’t commit violence by itself. Yet it
gets the blame for homicide, suicide and accidental deaths and injuries.
About this time last month, the gun prohibition lobby was having fits that the Trump administration was cutting staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, especially in the Division of Violence Prevention, which reportedly “studies and works to prevent gun deaths and injuries.”
According to one published report lamenting the staff cuts, “The downsizing has also hit the data systems used to track gun violence and craft more effective policies to address it.”
Having spent the past quarter-century writing about “all things firearm,” this remark got my attention. At no time in my career as a journalist have I ever seen any “effective policies” that were more successful at reducing gun-related violent crime than locking up criminals for a very long time. It’s pretty simple, really; a violent individual with a pattern of recidivism is not going to be committing armed robberies, carjackings, drive-by shootings, aggravated assaults, murders, or any other crimes while living rent-free at the “gray bar hotel.”
Back in 1996, Congress adopted a measure known as the Dickey Amendment, named for its sponsor, the late Congressman Jay Dickey (R-Ark.). His intent was to deprive the CDC of funding, which was used for research advocating gun control. Everytown for Gun Safety boasts on its website about its “fierce advocacy” to restore such funding back in 2019. Since then, the annual allocation for this research has been $25 million, according to The Trace, a pro-gun-control online publication supported by anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
The long and short of this is how anti-gunners using CDC data have been referring to a “gun violence epidemic” to justify their calls for bans on certain firearms and increasing restrictions on where and when guns may be carried for personal protection.
Gun rights leader Alan Gottlieb is not sorry to see the CDC’s
gun control research staff reduced. “Gun ownership,” he says,
“is not a communicable disease.”)
Interesting Observations
When this news first broke, one guy who didn’t lament was Alan Gottlieb at the Second Amendment Foundation.
“With these reductions,” he said, “the government is no longer treating gun ownership as a communicable disease.”
Decades ago, he was one of a handful of people involved in passing the very first “Three Strikes” law, which even got support from then-President Bill Clinton. The plan was simple: Commit three violent felonies and you’re out. Done. Finished. Sent to prison and you’ll stay there.
“Ever since the CDC inserted itself into the gun rights debate,” Gottlieb observed recently, “the agency has spent millions of dollars to promote the notion that gun-related violence is a public health issue, and they’ve mostly gotten away with it, thanks largely to their allies in the media treating everything they say as gospel. But it’s not a ‘health crisis,’ it’s a crime problem, and the antidote is not restricting the rights of law-abiding gun owners, which CDC research invariably seems to suggest, but instead restricting the freedom of violent repeat offenders.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the loudest opposition came from — you guessed it — the far left, including gun control types.
Intriguing Data
What makes this “gun violence” debate intriguing is how anti-gunners describe everything — homicides, suicides, accidents and negligent discharges — as “gun violence.” It has enabled them to proclaim that every year, thousands upon thousands of people die from “gun violence,” as if they died from some dreaded disease.
Pew Research recently reported on the most recent complete data available, from 2023. That year, a whopping 58% of all firearms-related fatalities were suicides, which is not a criminal act so much as an act of despair. Homicides accounted for 38% of the fatalities (17,927) while a paltry 463 were actual accidents and another 434 were attributed to “undetermined circumstances.”
Statistically, firearms are responsible for a fraction of all U.S.
deaths in any given year. Suicide accounts for more fatalities
than murder or mishaps.
The total number of murders that year was 22,830, according to Pew, so roughly 79% involved guns. In total, the 46,278 gun-related deaths in 2023 was the third-highest body count on record, Pew said. The record was set in 2021, when a staggering 48,830 people died from gunshot wounds.
But wait a minute. When you consider the current U.S. population is an estimated 346,848,809, according to Worldometer, we’re talking about a tiny fraction of all the people in this country. Of course, every one of these fatalities is a tragedy. It would be a great accomplishment to even reduce the number of victims by 25%.
There is considerable money in “gun violence research.” Perhaps
the researchers will discover there is no such thing as “gun violence.”
It’s just violent crime involving firearms.
Follow the Money
Earlier, we mentioned the $25 million annually provided by Congress for research. According to The Trace, the CDC’s Injury Center “has managed half of the research funding — $12.5 million annually.”
You know what they say: The money is not in the cure, but in the research. SAF’s Gottlieb had something to say about this.
“One complaint we’ve heard is that these cuts have ‘decimated’ staff responsible for so-called ‘gun violence research and prevention,’ but so far all of this research does not appear to have prevented a single violent crime,” he said. “Instead, we see declarations that more research is needed, while anti-gunners use CDC data to erode Second Amendment rights. That sounds like a perpetual ‘make work’ effort to keep the public funding flowing while gun owners are essentially treated like plague carriers, or lepers.”
Speaking of Money
Insider reports a lot of numbers, and one which recently got our immediate attention is $10 million. This is the amount of money the aforementioned Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety reportedly plans to spend in 2026 to elect Democrat state attorneys general.
The purpose is to put more anti-Trump AGs in office to harass the Trump administration with legal actions. In the process, of course, those AGs will promote and/or defend restrictive gun laws at the state level.
According to the New York Times, “Everytown has for years spent money on down-ballot efforts to elect Democratic candidates for state legislatures, particularly in places where gun control measures had a chance of being enacted and where smaller sums of money could have an influence on races.” Well, at least they’re up front about it!
The Justice Department and ATF have ditched the Biden-era
“Zero Tolerance policy” which should make small dealers,
collectors and gun show operators breathe a little easier.
Good News Deptartment
Who likes gun shows? Who has a federal firearms license (FFL) to operate a small dealership?
Last month, the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced a full 180-degree shift in priorities from the Biden administration’s war on gun owners and retailers. Gone is Joe Biden’s Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy, also known as the former president’s Zero Tolerance Policy. This was a strategy the Biden White House announced in 2021 that set more stringent criteria for Industry Operations compliance inspections to identify licensees with certain qualifying violations, according to the announcement from DOJ.
For the record, Attorney General Pamela Bondi had this to say: “This Department of Justice believes that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right. The prior administration’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy unfairly targeted law-abiding gun owners and created an undue burden on Americans seeking to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms.”
Additionally, according to the DOJ announcement, “DOJ and ATF have plans to revisit the regulatory framework surrounding stabilizing braces (Final Rule 2021R-08F) and the definition of ‘engaged in the business’ of firearms dealing (Final Rule 2022R-17F).”
