Wow. The National Rifle Association “silenced” research. But the article’s details show no support for such a headline.
The story is about governmnt funded “disease research” during the 1990s that pronounced such things as that homes with guns are more likely to experience homicides and suicides by those guns, and that guns in the homes are more likely to kill household residents than to kill home-invasion robbers. Of course, this alleged research was widely discredited. Households without guns tend to be different from households with guns. Retirees in low-crime gated communities, for example, are probably less likely to have guns in their homes. Younger people living in more dangerous or volatile circumstances may be more likely to have guns in their homes. The CDC’s alleged research compared apples to oranges.
And just think about how rare home-invasion robberies really are. Guns in homes almost certainly prevent many such robberies before they are EVER CONTEMPLATED. It is very difficult to measure such phenomena.
And why were the taxpayers of the 1990s made to pay for such anti-gun propaganda (masquerading as research) in the first place? And why on earth did the Centers for Disease Control think its mission included paying for such anti-gun “research”? How does that relate to controlling disease?
The American people–acting through gun-rights organizations and otherwise–demanded that Congress take action to shut off government funds for such propaganda purposes.
In fact, government funding of research rarely accomplishes much of anything except demands for ever-more government. A case can be made that ALL GOVERNMENT FUNDING of research should be stripped and ended immediately. Read this book by Terrence Kealy.
If cutting government funding is “silencing” research, then the government is silencing almost all research that disagrees with its catastrophic climate-change arguments. See here, here, and here.
