John Lott’s newest piece at Fox News starts this way:
If we are to believe the mainstream media, the powerful NRA has used its political muscle to keep people ignorant of how guns impact our safety. They are supposedly to blame for the elimination of firearms research. This is all a result of a 1996 amendment to the federal budget stating “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Thus last month, ABC News reported: “In 1996 the NRA successfully lobbied Congress to pull millions of dollars out of government-funded firearms research. This has resulted in essentially a 17 year moratorium on major studies about gun injuries.”
The Washington Post worried: “[Academics] were forced to stop their work at the point of a gun — or at least at the insistence of National Rifle Association.” Thousands of news reports have made the same assertions over the last 13 months.
Nice story line, but a new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center shows none of this is true. The amendment didn’t ban federal research. Indeed, to the contrary, federal funded research, which was never an important part of the total, actually increased since then. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
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