"Federally Funded Gun Control Propaganda"
March 20, 2002 by: Phyllis Schlafly
The federal government
says it lacks funding
for much-needed research
about the alarming increase
in autism, asthma, diabetes
and other serious childhood conditions.
Now we know where scarce
research money goes:
to fund gun-control propaganda.
The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
funded a study just released
about an event that is extremely rare:
firearm deaths of children
aged 5 to 14 years.
The Journal of Trauma
published its results in an article entitled
"Firearm Availability
and Unintentional Firearm Deaths,
Suicide, and Homicide
among 5-14 Year Olds."
Far fewer children
die each year in firearm incidents
than from car accidents,
fires, poisoning, suffocation, or drowning.
In fact, the firearm accident
rate for children has declined
much faster than any
other major type of accident.
The report fails
to admit that,
during the last ten years
of its study,
accidental childhood
deaths from firearms fell by more than 50 percent.
This decline in firearm
accidents occurred
during the same period
in which states increasingly
allow citizens to carry
concealed guns.
In 1999, more than
12,000 Americans died from accidental poisoning,
while only 824
died from firearm accidents,
only 88 of whom were
children.
Yet the CDC is apparently
more interested in stopping guns than poisons.
The CDC spent its
money asking if more children die from firearms
in states that have more
firearms.
Where is Senator William
Proxmire and his Golden Fleece awards
for ridiculous government
waste when we need him?
The study found
that Alaska has the highest rate of childhood firearm deaths,
followed by Montana and
then Idaho.
What do they all have
in common?
All three are sparsely
populated states,
featuring lots of hunting
and difficult access to emergency rooms.
The most densely
populated states,
which include New Jersey,
Rhode Island, Hawaii and Massachusetts,
have the lowest rate
of childhood firearm deaths.
The top ten states in
childhood firearm safety
are all in densely populated
areas
where no one is far from
an emergency room.
But the unremarkable
correlation of population density
and emergency response
to firearm accident deaths
is not what the CDC was
seeking, and so it was completely ignored.
The study also manipulated
the scope of the research
by eliminating the District
of Columbia,
which has the strictest
gun control laws in the country
combined with some
of the worst violence.
Next, the researchers
eliminated youths age 15 and higher,
who flout gun control
laws and injure unarmed citizens.
Deaths of 15-19 year-olds
by firearms
are nearly ten times
the rate of the younger group,
according to the National
Safety Council,
and thus far more significant.
This study was initiated
during the Clinton Administration,
and its only plausible
purpose was to promote gun control
and to try to rebut John
R. Lott's brilliant book,
"More Guns, Less Crime."
The Clinton Administration
hatched this study
in order to claim that
states having relatively many guns
harm children more than
states having relatively few guns,
presumably to be followed
by the mantra
that we must ban guns
"for the children."
Which of the 50
states have more firearms?
Incredibly, the study
simply assumes what it claims to prove:
it asserts a state-by-state
level of firearm ownership
based on the number of
deaths from firearms.
The conclusion of
this expensive study is,
in effect, that states
with higher numbers of adult deaths from firearms
also have higher numbers
of childhood deaths from firearms.
Is this what the CDC
is spending its scarce resources on?
Had the researchers
simply approached the gun control issue directly,
they would have found
that pro-gun states have very low childhood firearm death rates.
New Hampshire, which
protects gun ownership and allows carrying concealed guns,
has the fifth lowest
child mortality rate from firearms,
and Vermont, one of the
most pro-gun states in the country,
has the eleventh lowest
rate of childhood deaths from firearms.
An accompanying
editorial in the Journal of Trauma,
far from the headlines,
concedes that states
with the highest rates of firearm deaths by children
do not have particularly
high rates of gun ownership after all.
Its response to this
is to demand "future studies"
to try to fit the
data to the thesis.
This CDC-funded
study follows a pattern of politically biased junk science
published in medical
journals on the subject of guns.
Publications that
support gun control
then run headlines about
the claims without checking the details.
Now that we have
a new president,
he should tell the CDC
to do some sensible studies
about the real health
problems children face,
such as potential
harm from Ritalin and the many vaccines now mandated.
Congress should also
look into whether the CDC has violated the Dickey Amendment,
which prohibits the CDC
from spending funds to promote gun control.
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