A major push by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wasn’t enough to lift a provision that has effectively chilled funding for federal research into gun violence in the omnibus spending bill.
Pelosi’s bid include a rider on gun violence research in the $1.1 trillion spending bill came up short. The bill was unveiled early Wednesday morning.
The California Democrat recently said during an event with families of victims of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting that any bill cannot “leave the station that still has that ban on research.”
In 1996, an appropriations bill prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “advocate or promote gun control,” and it was extended in 2011 to the National Institutes of Health. That language has acted as a defacto ban on research.
President Obama allowed the CDC to resume funding gun violence research, but Congress has committed no funding. That won’t change in the latest spending deal.
A coalition of doctor groups pushing for lifting the language was dismayed.
“We continue to believe a central part of addressing these tragedies is through conducting rigorous scientific research, which has not happened for nearly 20 years,” according to the group Doctors for America.
