CPRC to testify to House Appropriations Committee tomorrow on whether the CDC should get roughly $50 million for firearms research, New York Times Reporter makes explicit his political biases on gun control

Dr. John Lott will be testifying before the House Appropriations Committee tomorrow at 10:30 AM, Thursday, March 7, 2019. The hearing is on whether the Centers for Disease Control should get around $50 million to conduct research on firearms.

What the Dickey Amendment says is: “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.”

— Centers for Disease Control official Dr. Mark Rosenberg was using Official CDC publications to lobby for more gun control. It was because of these actions that the Dickey amendment was passed. 

— Here are some public comments that top CDC officials were making supporting gun control.

— “We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths.  We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” (P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, CDC, quoted in Marsha F. Goldsmith, “Epidemiologists Aim at New Target: Health Risk of Handgun Proliferation,” Journal of the American Medical Association vol. 261 no. 5, February 3, 1989, pp. 675-76.)

— O’Carroll’s successor Dr. Mark Rosenberg was quoted in the Washington Post as wanting his agency to create a public perception of firearms as “dirty, deadly—and banned.” (William Raspberry, “Sick People With Guns,” Washington Post, October 19, 1994.

As Dr. Lott notes in his testimony, one of the poorly done studies that were funded by the CDC was Kellermann (see pages 6 and 7 of Lott’s testimony).

Copies of the written testimony that will be given to the committee are available in these links.

Of course, the media is already weighing in on this hearing.

Talk about media bias by the New York Times. Ted Alcorn, who identifies himself as a reporter for the paper, has no problem indicating he only thinks that gun control advocates who believe that there is a necessity for more federal research dollars are “experts.”