Fund gun research

You wouldn’t think a trip to a grocery store to buy strawberries could be a life-changing event. But this is America, where gun violence is an epidemic.

So what now? The victims will be mourned. The police officer will be honored for his courage. Democrats in Congress will demand action, while Republicans will push back. We’ve watched this all play out before, and yet the bloodshed continues.

If only our current leaders would follow the example of Mark Rosenberg and the late U.S. Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark.—two men on opposing sides of the gun debate who eventually teamed up to pursue a common goal: public safety. Dickey was well known for the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using federal funds intended for injury prevention to advocate for gun control.

Yet he forged an unlikely friendship with Rosenberg, president emeritus of the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta whose 20-year career at the CDC included leading the agency’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and serving as assistant surgeon general.

What the two men realized, Rosenberg told an editorial writer, is that “there are ways that you can keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them while you are protecting the rights of gun owners and reducing gun violence.”

And in that spirit, in 2018 Congress passed clarifying language that retained the Dickey Amendment but said the CDC could resume research on gun violence as long as it wasn’t lobbying for gun control.

Rosenberg said clarifying the amendment, rather than repealing it, was key to building bipartisan support. The $50 million in federal funding is a start, he added, but it’s a piddling amount compared with what the U.S. has spent on lifesaving research into issues such as car safety and heart disease.