Hacker News Reader

Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

Like with tobacco, big studies have been suppressed. Guns are far from a well-ventilated issue, they're just well-entrenched.

The Dickey amendment got clarified in 2018, and the first earmarks for research were for FY2020 - so, I'd say we wait with those proclamations a few more years.

View on HN

What difference are those studies going to make? If Columbia University in the City of New York discovers you can use guns to kill people, are voters suddenly going to go "oh, well then!"

That's clearly not the kind of research that's going to be done.

Funding of gun studies means we can make arguments backed up by data instead of partisan bickering. Calls to arm teachers in classrooms or mandate trigger locks on guns have real world effects, and both sides think they're right about it. Funding for studies of specific actions and policies help us as a society make more informed decisions.

More info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5993411/

You will find that many of us gun rights supporters don't care what data comes out. I don't support 2a because fewer than n people die per year from guns.

Facts often drive behavior and understanding.

Examples:

- Are there correlations between outcomes and specific brands, configurations, or other attributes of firearm?

- Are there correlations between sales at specific outlets and outcomes?

- Is age and/or experience correlated with negative outcomes?

The assumption is that studying this would negatively impact gun ownership. I don't think that's true. Consider that anti-gun rhetoric over the .50 Barrett rifle. You may find that it's really a collector's item that isn't associated with crime. I'm sure there are many examples similar to this, that are blocked by black and white opinion on the matter, fueled by mutual ignorance.

The Dickey Amendment didn't ban any studies or doing research, it banned the CDC from advocating gun control policies at a time when the administration was pushing it to use its authority/reputation to do so. It would be like me saying you can do all the research you want on teenage pregnancy and the like, but we're not funding your department to do political advocacy campaigns for abstinence. Stick to the science.

...and yet, where are these publicly funded studies on gun violence since? It's a ban in fact, if not a ban in law.

Here's a CDC-funded study on gun violence from 2013:

https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1

You've been repeatedly and blatantly lied to by the media and politicians about the CDC being "banned" from researching gun violence. The ban was on the use of public funds to advocate for specific gun laws/policies, not on research into the subject itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com