More than 100 medical groups are pressuring Congress to fund more gun-control research even though fire and water lead to far more accidental child-deaths than do firearms.
According to The Guardian, “a coalition of more than 100 medical groups” sent Congress a letter Wednesday and requested money to fund gun research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Funding research that portrays gun-legislation as public health was disallowed in 1996, via the Dickey amendment. The amendment prohibits the CDC from using research money to “advocate or promote gun control,” and that prohibition has been applied to bar funding for CDC research into guns, gun ownership, etc.
The Guardian reports:
Barack Obama instructed the CDC to resume studying gun violence in the wake of the 2012 Newtown school shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 school children and six adults. In 2013, Obama issued a memorandum directing the agency to study “the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it”. Obama also requested $10m in 2014 and 2015 to fund the research but both requests were blocked by Congress.
The irony of the Democrats’ use of children to push for CDC gun research is that very basic things–like fire and water–pose a much greater risk to children via accidental deaths.
Breitbart News previously reported CDC figures compiled by John Lott, which showed that in 2010 the number of children unintentionally killed in fire-related deaths was over seven times higher than the number of children killed in unintentional gun-related deaths, and the number of children killed in unintentional drowning deaths was sixteen times higher than the number of children killed in unintentional gun-related deaths.
And if we turn from children and look at deaths for all ages, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) shows that in 2013 there were 33,636 gun-related deaths–intentional and accidental combined–but there were 35,369 car-related deaths and a monstrous 46,471 drug-related deaths.
The car-related deaths are even greater when looked at as a percentage, because there are more than a hundred million fewer cars than guns, yet car-related deaths are higher than gun-related deaths.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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