Suppose there were a disease that killed 30,000 people plus a year. And suppose Congress put it into the spending laws: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cannot study it.
Would you be mad?
I would. Or rather, am. Because there is a disease, and Congress indeed did stipulate it—it’s off limits to the CDC.
Death by gunshot.
It seems the NRA has some—sorry—pretty heavy guns. All research has been halted for the last 15 years. So we don’t know the epidemiology of a disease that’s killed 360,000 people in that period.
Bad science, says the NRA. Actually, they claim that it’s not science at all, but politics.
Yeah?
I’d say that any activity that ends in death—whether it’s smoking, drunk driving, or gun ownership is fair game for the CDC. Here’s NBC on the story:
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the CDC conducted original, peer-reviewed research into gun violence, including questions such as whether people who had guns in their homes gained protection from the weapons. (The answer, researchers found, was no. Homes with guns had a nearly three times greater risk of homicide and a nearly five times greater risk of suicide than those without, according to a 1993 study in the New England Journal of Medicine.)
Well, it seems the money is gonna start flowing again. Obama directed the CDC to start studies again, and has apparently put up the funds. Republicans are predictably furious.
I didn’t realize what this was all about until I saw the clip below. And then it became clear.
The NRA, says Debra Maggart, a conservative pro-gun NRA member, is cynically creating false issues and lousy legislation. When any bill meets opposition, the NRA goes into action, whipping up hysteria in its members. And what do they do?
Write a check.
It’s as cynical as it is evil. And the effect has been to create a mentality of paranoia and intransigence that precludes any reasonable debate.
No, that’s not what I say—it’s what Maggart says. The NRA kicked in $150,000 just to defeat her. Oh, and that’s a state representative. Wanna bet how much they’d be willing to spend on a US Senator?
“Did they bully you?” asks the moderator.
“That’s exactly what they did,” Maggart replies.
Well, at least she got a congratulatory “certificate” from the group after she was defeated. She was still a member, you see.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I know people who have guns. My father had a gun. I’m not intrinsically antigun.
I am, however, very much against any group that values the almighty dollar more than the lives of men, women, and children.
In Latin, it’s ne fas. A violation of divine law. It gets pretty directly into Spanish as nefasto. Less obvious in English as nefarious.
That’s not enough?
How about despicable and heinous?
