by Dave Workman | Senior Editor
Alan Gottlieb,
CCRKBA Chairman
Reacting to a story in the Seattle Times recently about the 20-year effort by a local doctor to restore funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct gun violence research, the head of a national gun rights organization told the newspaper, “Gun ownership is not a disease.”
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which is headquartered in Bellevue, a city just across Lake Washington from Seattle, gave the newspaper an earful about CDC research that led to a vote by Congress two decades ago to cut off funding for what critics said was “agenda-driven” research to support gun control.
“The problem we had,” he explained, “was with how past money was spent with the CDC. The research was aimed to push an agenda. If you had doctors who were doing responsible research that wasn’t biased, I don’t think there would be objections to funding it.”
The article was about Harborview Medical Center’s Dr. Fred Rivara and his two-decade battle to lift the ban on gun research by the CDC aimed at “the public-health effects of gun violence.” That ban was imposed when gun rights organizations, primarily the National Rifle Association, began crying foul that the research seemed invariably tilted toward pushing a gun control agenda.
The Seattle Times story noted that in 2014, there were 33,599 firearms-related deaths in this country. What wasn’t mentioned was that the majority of those were suicides. To that end, Gottlieb and the NRA have the upper hand by supporting legislation currently moving in Olympia that is aimed at suicide prevention. Gottlieb had personally been working on the effort since early last year, and now Substitute House Bill 2793 has a good chance of becoming law.
Among gun rights activists, there is a growing chorus for a change in the way “gun violence” is reported. Many believe strongly that the only reason suicides are melded with homicides and outright accidents, and even justifiable acts of self-defense by armed private citizens, and justifiable homicides by police. It is to inflate the number of deaths by firearms to make it appear to the general public that there is an epidemic of “gun violence” in progress.
But backers of “gun violence” research seem to ignore a report in 2013 that had been okayed by an executive order from President Barack Obama. Perhaps, some gun rights activists suggest, it is because the findings were not exactly what they expected.
Among the things that the report revealed were:
- “Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61% of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.”
- Gun shows aren’t the problem: “More recent prisoner surveys suggest that stolen guns account for only a small percentage of guns used by convicted criminals. … According to a 1997 survey of inmates, approximately 70% of the guns used or possess by criminals at the time of their arrest came from family or friends, drug dealers, street purchases, or the underground market.”
- Gun turn-in programs are ineffective and “gun buy-back programs typically recover less than 1,000 guns. On the local level, buy-backs may increase awareness of firearm violence. However, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, guns recovered in the buy-back were not the same guns as those most often used in homicides and suicides.”
- The effectiveness of gun bans and background checks “is an unresolved issue.”
- “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
- “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”
- “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
Since that report was published, it has become widely known that nearly all of the mass shooters in recent history, with but a couple of exceptions – Sandy Hook and Oregon’s Clackamas mall, for example – passed background checks. Still, gun control proponents continue to press for expanded checks, perhaps as a step toward registration, which concerns gun rights activists.
