Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky wants you to know that her new public health campaign to end gun violence is not “about gun control.”
Don’t believe your lying ears. The Biden administration is absolutely trying to use CDC powers to take away your guns.
Walensky may claim she just wants to find common ground with gun owners and is only asking, “What can we do to stop people from dying?” But both the history of CDC research on firearms and President Joe Biden’s aggressive anti-gun agenda betray her true intentions.
In a 1994 presentation to the American Society of Criminology, University of Illinois sociologist David Bordua and epidemiologist David Cowan called the existing CDC-funded research on guns “advocacy based on political beliefs rather than scientific fact.” Specifically, Bordua and Cowan accused the “incestuous” CDC-funded firearms research of assuming without evidence that “there is a causal association between gun ownership and the risk of violence, that this association is consistent across all demographic categories, and that additional legislation will reduce the prevalence of firearms and consequently reduce the incidence of violence.”
More recently, the FiveThirtyEight blog examined the CDC’s numbers on gun injury estimates and concluded that they did not meet the organization’s scientific standards and should be treated as “unstable and potentially unreliable.”
Even then, one might be willing to ignore the CDC’s dubious gun research record if it weren’t for Biden’s insistence on using the language of public health to justify his radical anti-Second Amendment stance. In his April 8 speech outlining his administration’s gun control agenda, he said, “Today, we’re taking steps to confront not just the gun crisis, but what is actually a public health crisis. … Gun violence in this country is an epidemic.”
Biden did not have any data to back up his assertion that gun violence is a public health crisis. But that is what the new campaign by the CDC is all about — willing pseudo-scientific papers into existence that can justify the federal government’s infringement of your Second Amendment rights.
The United States is suffering from a massive rise in homicides, most of them from guns. Murder was up 37% across the country last year, and it seems likely to rise again this year. Criminologists and sociologists should study why our country is suffering from a wave of violent crime. Some have already produced promising research.
University of Massachusetts doctoral student Travis Campbell has produced a paper showing that in cities where there were Black Lives Matter protests between 2014 and 2019, there was a 15% to 20% reduction in lethal force by police officers, which is good. But in these same cities, there was also a 10% rise in murders. Whether it was police pulling back or communities refusing to cooperate with them, we don’t know. But Black Lives Matter activism appears to correlate with more murders. An explosion of Black Lives Matter rioting coinciding with a sharply rising murder rate in 2020 might not be a mere coincidence. It is possible that studies will recommend a heavy increase in police funding and policing to curb gun crime.
Either way, the CDC should butt out. It has already cratered its credibility by flip-flopping on the need for vaccinated adults to wear masks. It has flip-flopped three times on what the proper measurement is for social distancing in classrooms. CDC officials still haven’t explained why their guidance for mandatory masks for children under age 12 in schools is the exact opposite of what Europe’s Center for Disease Prevention and Control recommends.
The CDC has way more on its plate right now than it can handle. It should stick to studying diseases and leave crime to the criminologists.
