A Childrens Health Crisis Officials Overlook: Shootings

Two decades have passed since Congress enacted a budget amendment forbidding federal money to be used “to advocate or promote gun control.” This prohibition, a bow to the National Rifle Association, has had the effect of suppressing essential research by government agencies into how firearm violence affects public health. It’s as if lawmakers fear that knowledge and the Second Amendment are somehow incompatible.

Fortunately, not all research has been stopped. A sobering report this month in the journal Pediatrics provides a detailed look at the devastating toll that gunfire has had specifically on America’s children: a weekly average of 25 of them killed and 111 sent to emergency rooms. That translates into an annual total of nearly 7,100 dead and wounded children ages 17 and under. Only accidents, and cancers and other illnesses, kill more young people.

“Pediatric firearm injuries and deaths are an important public health problem in the United States,” the study concluded, adding that “understanding the nature, magnitude and health impact of firearm violence against children is an important first step” toward making them safer.

That point would seem self-evident, but federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stepped lightly on gun violence ever since that budget amendment went into effect. It may explain why this new study, though prepared in the main by C.D.C. researchers, appears not in a government document but in a journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/opinion/children-gun-injury-health.html?

Thanks to the gun lobby, federal law prohibits research into the third leading cause of death for young people: firearms. “These results,” the authors of that report concluded, “are consistent with the hypothesis that our firearms are killing us rather than protecting us.”

But don’t let the Republican-controlled Congress hear that. It seems to believe that the less we know about gun violence, the better off we will be. And that goes for their friends as well: Second Amendment absolutists and NRA/ILA apologists.