National
Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre is shown at the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md.NJ.com
Responding to the toddler’s death, Kentucky lawmaker Robert Damron said, “Why single out firearms? Why not talk about all the other things that endanger children, too?”
Scientific research might show Mr. Damron that, while access to pools, bathtubs and cribs dwarfs access to guns, the former do not kill as surely by drowning or suffocation as does a firearm held by a small child. However, the National Rifle Association has blocked all scientific study into the causes of gun deaths since the mid-1990s. So Damron knows what the NRA wants him to know.
Last year, Congress spent nothing to study 32,000 gun deaths, while it appropriated $860 million to NHTSA to study 34,000 vehicle fatalities. In fact, Congress has spent nothing every year since 1996 by inserting NRA-written language in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget, prohibiting any study that may be used to “advocate gun control.”
The 1960s auto industry blamed drivers for traffic deaths.
“Then we learned we could modify the product … and we changed the consequences of bad driving. We could do the same thing with firearms,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, of the Cal-Davis Violence Prevention Program. “The firearm industry is where the auto industry was, which is fighting regulation tooth and nail.”
“For policy to be effective, it needs to be based on evidence,” Wintemute told the Times. “The NRA and its allies in Congress have largely succeeded in choking off the development of evidence upon which that policy could be based.”
Facts (and knowledge) are not the gun loon's friend.
ReplyDeleteThen why is it that we keep offering you both, but you reject them?
Delete" the National Rifle Association has blocked all scientific study into the causes of gun deaths since the mid-1990s."
ReplyDeleteDo you really believe that statement?
Yes, don't you?
DeleteAccording to the CDC, two children under the age of fourteen die every day from drowning. That's more than 700 in a year. The total number of accidental deaths from gunfire are around 600--that's for all age groups. We've discussed the numbers before, and several of us showed that even if we bring in non-fatal incidents, water is still more dangerous than guns.
ReplyDeleteBut that's not the limit of errors in this piece. If Bloomberg or Soros want to fund a study into guns, they're free to do so. The government isn't allowed to, and that's a public policy decision not to fund studies that might be used to violate our rights. Again, private citizens are free to spend their own money however they wish.
They are making it sound like cars are safer because the government made them safer. What advancements came from the government and not from within the industry? I can't think of any, can you? For example, car manufactures use their own R&d money to develope a safety feature like airbags, introduce it in their flagship car, other manufactures take the idea and expand it, eventually it becomes relatively ubiquitous as the cost comes down- and THEN the government comes in and mandates it on the rest of the cars, and finally we have unscrupulous characters like Wintermute giving government the credit and saying the industry fought it tooth and nail. What a jerk.
ReplyDeleteBesides which, a "safe" gun is a useless gun. That's the real goal of the gun control freaks.
Delete