New York Times
Can new gun violence research find a way around political stagnation?
Dr. Bindi J. Naik-Mathuria, a pediatric trauma surgeon at the Washington-Texas Children’s Hospital who was tired of seeing a toddler die from a gunshot wound, to track down all gun-related casualties in Houston. Has a Federal Grant of $ 684,000. The goal is to identify and address “hotspots” of how public health researchers can track and contain coronavirus. Dr. Garen J. Wintemte, a doctor in the California emergency room and a longtime researcher of gun violence, told Detroit and Cleveland about greening empty spaces and the work of so-called violence blockers like former gangsters. He oversees scientific research on whether or not community intervention. Members — You can reduce gun-related casualties. Also, the research group RAND Corp. Behavioral scientist Andrew R. Morral uses advanced modeling tools to use detailed demographic information to estimate gun ownership in all states. According to him, the purpose is to look for patterns of gun murder and suicide, which is the first basic step in research that may lead to their reduction. Recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, Colorado, signing up for a morning newsletter from the New York Times have once again stalled Democrats and Republicans over background checks of gun buyers and a ban on offensive weapons. However, public health experts say new research could pave the way for gun policies to avoid partisan deadlocks and ultimately save thousands of lives. Studies by Naik-Mathuria and others are paid by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The center is again funding research on gun violence after nearly 25 years of hiatus imposed by Congress. Although it may not be possible to reduce the number of massacres, mass shootings account for a very small proportion of the approximately 40,000 Americans who die each year from gun violence. “There are at least five different gun violence issues in this country, including mass shootings,” said Moral, who holds a PhD in psychology. “There is also suicide. There is gun violence in urban areas, which mainly affects a minority of young men. There are family shootings. There are police shootings. And they are all different risk factors. They all have very different motives and they often contain different firearms. ”Like cancer, there is no single cure for the spread of gun violence in the United States. Experts say that if politicians want to make a difference, they will fund and listen to research that could allow liberals to steal people’s guns and inform policies that can deal with the genocide. He says he needs to stop the futile fight over whether he wants to do that. “It’s neither’holding a gun or preventing gun violence’,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who helped establish the CDC’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but opposed it in the late 1990s. He said he was fired under pressure from the Republicans. Center gun research. “Science has strategies that help define where both can be done. It protects the rights of law-abiding gun owners while reducing the damage caused by gun violence.” Federal funding for has almost disappeared after the 1996 Congress enacted the so-called Dicky Amendment. This banned the CDC from spending money to “support or promote gun control.” It’s named after Jay Dicky, a former Republican in Arkansas, who proudly declared the National Rifle Association’s “Pointman” in Washington. Dicky, who died in 2017, became friends with Rosenberg, who interrupted his work in a phenomenal event. The pair were so close that Rosenberg praised him at the Dickies funeral. In 2019, Betty, a former prosecutor and Supreme Court judge of the Arkansas Supreme Court, a former wife of Rosenberg and Dickies, helped convince Congress to regain funding. Congressmen have allocated $ 25 million split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health for research into firearm injury prevention. Research proponents say the money is small compared to the breadth of the problem, but the institution is currently funding nearly 20 studies. “Millions of dollars have been spent trying to understand how we eradicate cancer. We must be able to do the same with gun violence,” he said. Is Congressman Lucy McBass, who won the election in 2018, promising to end gun violence after her 17-year-old son was shot dead. .. “Like any other public health crisis, we need to be able to investigate the impact on the CDC and NIH and provide that raw data, the ability to capture the significant impact of gun violence,” she adds. I did. Treating gun violence as a public health issue is not a new idea. In 1991, the Rosenberg program awarded a research grant to researchers who published groundbreaking research in the New England Journal of Medicine. After it was published, the National Rifle Association aimed at it. The Dicky amendment was a compromise between Democrats who wanted more research and Republicans who wanted to close the Rosenberg center. Research on the effectiveness of gun policy is scarce, many of which are not rigorous enough to prove or disprove that any of the laws discussed in Washington would bring any benefit, a national collaborative study of RAND’s gun violence research. Said the morals of commanding. Comprehensive analysis of the serious scientific literature. According to existing surveys, one policy under consideration by Congress, the expansion of background checks, could make a difference. RAND has found “reasonably good evidence that current background checks can help reduce violent crime,” so it makes sense to think that “checking all sales may be more useful.” Seems like. ”RAND also has reasonably good evidence that waiting for a gun to buy reduces both suicide and violent crime. And there is strong evidence that laws requiring the safe storage of guns from children reduce the injuries and deaths of young people from guns, or what RAND calls “supportive.” However, President Joe Biden claims that the ban on federal assault weapons that lasted from 1994 to 2004 “broke these genocide,” but evidence is unknown. According to Moral, research is only a handful and does not “convincingly show causality.” Not because it’s missing, but because of the flaws in research design. After the recent development of the coronavirus vaccine highlighted the importance of scientific research, Rosenberg said he was ready to accept the argument that gun violence research could save lives. He likened it to the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government poured into studying car deaths in the 1970s and 1980s. This has led to safety measures such as seatbelt requirements and reduced speed limits, saving millions of lives. It was the argument he used to help convince Congress of the right amount of money for gun violence research in 2019. The study itself was never completely banned, and in 2013, weeks after the massacre that killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, President Barack Obama told the CDC to study funding gun violence. Instructed to reconsider. The agency commissioned a report outlining its priorities to the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, but it remained largely unchanged. By 2019, after the Democratic Party regained the House of Representatives, liberal organizations like MoveOn.org called on Congress to abolish the Dicky amendment. Signed by almost all House Democrats. But Rosenberg said, “We will invest money in science and provide cover to Republicans and Democrats who love guns who can say to their members,’This is not money for gun control.'” Insisted that he should be left alone. He led the House subcommittee, which oversaw the CDC’s budget at the time, said he put $ 50 million into the budget that year, but the Republican-controlled Senate abolished it. The two chambers of commerce have agreed on a compromise of $ 25 million, but she said she hopes to double the funding this year. Houston trauma surgeon Naik Maturia said he wants Washington to address the issue of gun violence as an injury prevention issue rather than a politics issue. She said she began researching ways to reduce gun violence about six years ago after seeing “children die from shooting their heads when they find a gun at home.” .. Her current research aims to determine risk factors for gun violence in children and adults, and her past work has brought about some changes in medical practice, she said. She said a Texas pediatrician was hesitant to talk about gun safety because of concerns that “it would offend parents and become political.” So she and her group created a broader safety video with gun safety messages, such as locking and storing guns, along with tips on how to keep children away from poison. Wintemte, who directs the anti-violence research program at the Davis Medical Center at the University of California, Sacramento, said he lost the grant after the Dicky Amendment was enacted. Over the next two decades, he said his work had been supported by the state of California. Basics; NIH not specifically specified in Nickey Amendment. And the Ministry of Justice. He also said he spent over $ 2 million on his own money to continue working. His program has received $ 744,000 from the CDC this year to fund three studies. He said new funding from the agency is attracting young scientists to work. Still, he laments the lost time. “It’s as if we had decided.’Stop studying coronavirus. Stop studying cancer and heart disease. Let’s keep this problem going,” he said. “If the study were to continue 25 years ago, would thousands of people who would be alive today die?” This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company