So it looks like researchers in Gun-control Nation will get funding into the CDC budget for the third year in a row. Which is all fine and well except to tell you the truth, I never really understood why my tax dollars ever went to fund research into the causes and prevention of gun violence in the first place.

              I remember the first time I ever shot off a gun by accident.  I was sitting in my living room in South Carolina, playing around with my Colt 45 pistol and the damn thing just went off. I thought the gun wasn’t loaded. I was wrong. The round went through the front door, smashed the storm door, and ended up God knows where. At least it didn’t wind up in someone’s rear end.

              I also remember the first time I ever shot a gun with the intention of killing someone else. It was an M-14, I was on the firing line at Fort Dix, NJ and I was told that if I didn’t hit the torso-shaped target 200 yards downrange I wasn’t going in for chow.

              Then in 1994 I read the two articles in the New England Journal of Medicine which found that access to a gun in the home created a health risk known as being dead. The research for these articles, by the way, was funded by the CDC and was the reason that the CDC didn’t fund any more gun research for twenty-five years.

              During that quarter century, somewhere around 300,000 Americans died before they otherwise would have died because either they or someone else picked up a gun and shot them with it.  Another 1.75 million got shot but somehow survived.

              Each year somewhere around 400,000 drivers and passengers get killed in car accidents, another several million are injured in a permanent way. We know exactly what to do to prevent these injuries from taking place – seat belts, speed limits, crash-proof design, a combination of safety features built into the vehicles and better training before drivers take to the road.

              So, what do my friends in Gun-control Nation say when it comes to reducing injuries from guns? They say we need the same kind of ‘public health’ research for guns that the taxpayers have funded for cars. And now that research has started up again.

              There’s only one little problem with this approach. It’s complete bullshit and anyone who subscribes to it doesn’t know anything about guns.

              The guns whose use is responsible for at least 90,000 of the 110,000 deaths and injuries suffered each year from gun violence are not guns that can be used ‘responsibly’ or ‘safely.’ They are guns that are designed for one purpose and one purpose only – to end human life.

And let’s not get into a whole thing about whether someone used a Glock or a Sig or a Beretta or a Smith & Wesson M&P in an ‘offensive’ or ‘defensive’ way. Cars are designed to make it easier and faster to move from here to there. Handguns like the ones listed above are designed to end human life in an easier and faster way.

Want to deny what I just said? You’re denying reality. And this denial of reality seems to be versant throughout the public health and medical communities.

I love how some medical organizations talk about approaching gun violence from a ’consensus’  point of view. What are they saying? That we can all sit down and figure out a way that law-abiding Americans can walk around their neighborhoods with a Glock or a Sig in their pockets and somehow the neighborhood will still be safe? 

I once had a conversation with a physician who runs a program which has social workers standing on the corner ready to intervene when/if two rival gangs come together and the ‘fuck you’s’ begin to fly. I asked him whether the social worker would alert the cops if one of the kids was carrying a gun.

“Of course not,” he said. “He would lose all credibility if he did that!”

If you can identify any threat to the human community that is worse than the threat represented by a 16-year-old wandering around with a loaded handgun in his pocket, I’ll immediately donate $100 to the charity of your choice.

If the government wants to spend my tax dollars on gun violence research, why don’t they give the money to the Department of Justice rather than the CDC? After all, the 90,000 shootings each year which involve both a shooter and a separate victim happen to be crimes.

Or maybe we should re-define homicides and assaults committed with guns as just another public health threat like unclean water or cigarettes sold to kids.

The Deadliest Pathogen: Guns and Homicide (Guns in America): Weisser, Michael R.: 9781792317866: Amazon.com: Books