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Comment by throwawaymaths | Hacker News Reader

Remember when the CDC started tracking gun violence as an "epidemic"? Surely someone should but the CDC doing so is clearly outside of its charter. That was one major moment that betrayed the CDC becoming a political and not a scientific organization

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Help me understand how gunshot wounds have nothing to do with public health?

They study the other common forms of death/injury. If anything, giving guns a special exemption from scrutiny is the political move.

Plenty of other organizations public and private already handling this issue. No need to waste funds on it. Anything less is a dangerous distraction for the CDC which really needs to focus on its core competency -- protecting the us from pathogenic threats. Should the department of HUD send rockets to space? Of course not.

> Plenty of other organizations public and private already handling this issue.

So? We have more than one law enforcement agency, too.

> Should the department of HUD send rockets to space? Of course not.

Should the department of Health touch on a major health issue? Of course.

CDC is not "the department of health". That would be DHHS.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Yes that's exactly the problem. Scope has been creeping for decades. Effort reduplicated across several sub branches of DHHS

I’m not sure how to explain to you that some problems are multi-factorial.

Have you never needed another department’s assistance with a work task?

The CDC and HUD (and EPA and DOJ and whatnot) would both be involved in lead exposure in children, for example. Different aspects of the same big problem.

Is work an epidemic? At what rate do people die or get injured at work?

It is the leading cause of death for children and teens.

Thats interesting, do you have some references?

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/guns-remain-leading-cause-...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

https://www.kff.org/mental-health/child-and-teen-firearm-mor...

https://www.google.com/

I thought you were talking about work, its not clear you were talking about guns in your comment.

The CDC tracks accidents, too. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm

Yeah maybe the CDC should get into the business of OSHA too.

The mental health of the perpetrator is also a public health concern and could fairly be considered a epidemic

Yes.

The folks who want us to pretend gun violence isn’t a problem also oppose mental health funding.

This is a problem. Government departments must have delimited authority and scope. There are other government and nonprofit entities tracking gun violence. Absolutely no need for CDC to get involved except for stupid politics. It's a distraction from their core mission.

I doubt this took much of their resources or attention at all. Seems more like commenters are mad about this data being tracked rather than genuine concern over the departments resource allocations.

The CDC was directed by Congress to prevent injuries by the 1986 Injury Prevention Act and the 1990 Injury Control Act, notwithstanding your superficial and frankly moronic understanding of the agency.

> It's a distraction from their core mission.

So if they can study gun violence while still accomplishing their core mission without distraction, surely you’d be ok with this, I presume?

Aren't 2Aers the ones pushing the narrative toward mental health so they don't get slapped with gun control?

And neither of those are being tackled at all. It's as it's all or nothing. I prefer always to tackle complex problems through multiple angles, because they are complex.

Don't have a dog in this race, but were they also tracking deatha from auto accidents and the like? Because if it was part of a big pie chart of how people die, then no problem. If it was specifically only about guns, then it was political.

Answering that question takes less time than the comment took to type.

https://www.cdc.gov/transportation-safety/about/index.html

> but were they also tracking deatha from auto accidents and the like?

I mean, are we doing learned helplessness tonight or just pretending for rhetorical reasons or...?

https://www.cdc.gov/transportation-safety/index.html

All external injuries (mostly traumas, but also burns, poison, frostbite, etc.) that result in deaths, no matter their intention (murder, accident, suicide) have 2 chapters dedicated in the International Classification of Diseases 10 (also 11). Yes, tracking what harms and kills people is kinda important from the public health standpoint, so that there are resources to deal with the injuries and educate in case of prevention. It also happens to be interested in work related injuries too!

https://icd.who.int/browse10/2019/en#/XIX

https://icd.who.int/browse10/2019/en#/XX

To add to other comments, gun violence has a massive mental health component for which preventative treatment can save many lives. Of course it warrants study!

And given the well-documented copycat-killer phenomenon, modeling it similarly to an epidemic is very reasonable.

I’ve always found this to be an absurd political position:

- shooting deaths are not a gun problem, they’re a mental health problem. So we won’t fix anything by solving the gun problem.

“Ok… can we solve the mental health problem, then?”

- also no.

So better throw the baby with the bath water and not have CDC then have CDC treat gun violence or suicides as an epidemic, yes?

Great timing with this comment, as 20 children are shot in a church.

What is your threshold for epidemic?

Does 47,000 deaths per year (13.7 per 100,000) not qualify?

Why are you even complaining (trolling)? After decades of pressure, the gun lobby (NRA, GOA, etc) has finally eliminated CDC's role in researching gun violence.

Is outright victory insufficient? Must you continue to belabor the point?

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