Now that everyone except Donald Trump and the craziest of the crazies have decided that Joe is really the President, we can start taking care of business that has languished for the last four years. And one piece of business in that respect is whether we need to pass more gun-control laws.

              To that end Joe recently put together a study group that will come up with an agenda for new guns laws which will no doubt include the usual proposals like comprehensive background checks, assault rifle bans, a national red-flag laws – regulations that have been floating around for years. These proposals and others were discussed at a recent White House meeting which included all the usual gun-control suspects – Brady, Everytown – you know the bunch.

              One good piece of news for Gun-control Nation is that the CDC recently announced nearly $8 million in gun-research grants, monies which are appearing in the CDC research budget for the first time in more than twenty years. The CDC was prohibited from sponsoring gun research in 1997 when an Arkansas Congressman, Jay Dickey, rode to the defense of America’s gun owners and stripped the CDC from supporting gun research.

              Now the research spigot has been turned on again and 16 research projects will now be funded under the category of Research Grants to Prevent Firearm Violence and Injuries. I happen to know many of these researchers as well as having studied and cited some of their previous work. They are all scholars whose research deserves government financial support.

              Most of these research projects evaluate either ongoing or planned efforts to ‘intervene’ in the behavior and activities of at-risk populations with the hope that such

 interventions will reduce the number of injuries suffered from guns. Many of these projects utilize internet-based programs, others promote face-to-face interactions, the point is to evaluate which types of activities could be most successfully spread throughout the gun-owning community as a whole.

              It’s also good to see that much of the research is aimed (pardon the pun) at figuring out how to mitigate the social and emotional issues which are experienced by individuals who don’t necessarily suffer gun injuries themselves but are aware of gun violence either where they live or in the neighborhood where they go to school. I am also glad to see that our friend Ali Rowhani-Rahbar has been funded to study gun culture and appropriate intervention strategies for rural youth, a population which is often ignored when gun violence issues are discussed.

              If you have been any kind of consistent reader of my blogs, you’re probably asking yourself when is Mike the Gun Guy going to stop saying all those nice, positive things about the current state of gun-violence research and say something that’s not so positive or nice?  Which is what I am going to do right now, notwithstanding again my heartfelt support for evidence-based research on guns or anything else.

              I don’t care what the results of any of these research projects reveal in the next two or three years. There’s only one intervention that will have any chance of reducing gun violence: Get rid of the guns.

              We don’t have to get rid of all the guns. I have no problem with keeping a slide-action shotgun for high-flyers returning from Florida this month or a bolt-action 30-06 to bag Bambi later this year. Want to keep a 6-inch, target handgun around for an occasional trip to the range? Go right ahead. Keep two of them if you like, or even three.

              On the other hand, anyone who believes that you can do anything to make my Glock 17 pistol with its 16 rounds of military-grade ammunition into a ‘safe’ gun, doesn’t know the first thing about guns. And as long as the United States is the only country which allows ‘law-abiding’ residents access to those kinds of guns, all the research and all the talk about ‘interventions’ to reduce gun violence are crap. Plain, unadulterated crap.

              Could I find another way to somehow mitigate my concerns about such crap? I can’t and I won’t.