By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The Washington Examiner is reporting a new effort by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have so-called “gun violence” framed as a public health issue, while one of the nation’s leading Second Amendment advocates believes the strategy will fail.
Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), reminded the Washington Examiner this is not the first time the CDC has tried to insert itself into the gun rights debate by insisting gun-related violent crime is a public health issue. It has been a way for the CDC in the past to secure funding for “anti-gun research,” and years ago, Congress passed legislation to cut off the funding for such purposes.
Writing at The Hill in an Op-Ed in November 2015, Dr. Timothy Wheeler, then-director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO), detailed why Congress cut CDC gun control funding. As Wheeler noted at the time, the House Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee heard testimony blasting the CDCs advocacy efforts disguised as research, resulting in a committee report which included “a limitation to prohibit the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control from engaging in any activities to advocate or promote gun control.”
Wheeler added that the committee “warned CDC officials that it ‘does not believe that it is the role of the CDC to advocate or promote policies to advance gun control initiatives, or to discourage responsible private gun ownership.’”
DRGO is a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.
This sentiment apparently is not shared by the Biden administration, which compared a mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y. last year to “gun violence” and the COVID-19 pandemic. The Examiner article recalls Vice President Kamala Harris making a “veiled” comparison, asserting, “On the issue of gun violence, I will say, as I’ve said countless times, we are not sitting around waiting to figure out what the solution looks like. You know, we’re not looking for a vaccine.”
Gottlieb essentially told the Examiner this argument is nonsense, because guns do not transmit viruses. He asserted this renewed move by the CDC is a way for the government to use the public health “angle” to “gain more power and control over people.”
Last year, the CCRKBA blasted the CDC over its effort to treat gun-related crime to a public health crisis.
“But the CDC, which is not a crime control agency, has an unhealthy fixation on trying to make guns the issue, turning the Second Amendment into a public health problem,” Gottlieb said at the time.
“The CDC report showing gun-related deaths is alarming,” he added, “but even more alarming is the return of the CDC under Joe Biden’s administration to its assumed role as a gun control advocacy agency. This is why gun owners support legislation to keep the CDC out of anything remotely connected to firearms policy.”
But Gottlieb didn’t stop there.
“Maybe the real public health threat are people who commit violent crimes,” he suggested. “We don’t see the CDC working on a cure for all the problems that contribute to the uptick in violent crime, such as demonizing and defunding police agencies, reducing police manpower, despair over the economy and rising inflation under Joe Biden, the emotional pressures of job loss and homelessness; all of these factors play into the dilemma. Spotlighting guns is not going to provide a solution, but only a scapegoat to advance a gun control agenda.”
