By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
While gun control proponents are lamenting Trump administration staff cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which include its Division of Violence Prevention, a leading gun rights organization is defending and supporting the move.
The Trace, a Michael Bloomberg-backed pro-gun-control publication, is reporting the CDC has laid off “more than 2,400 people” and among them are people who worked in the CDC’s Injury Center, which includes the Violence Prevention group.
In response, the Second Amendment Foundation “is applauding the Trump administration cuts, which will hopefully take the CDC out of the gun control arena, at least for the foreseeable future,” according to a news release from the group.
The Guardian is reporting how the Trump administration has pared “several federal programs and research institutions aimed at preventing gun violence.”
“These cuts, advocates say, will disrupt – or even end – critical research and will ultimately lead to an increase in violence of all forms,” The Guardian says.
But SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb sees this as a positive move.
“Ever since the CDC inserted itself into the gun rights debate,” Gottlieb said, “the agency has spent millions of dollars to promote the notion that gun-related violence is a public health issue, and they’ve mostly gotten away with it, thanks largely to their allies in the media treating everything they say as gospel. But it’s not a ‘health crisis,’ it’s a crime problem, and the antidote is not restricting the rights of law-abiding gun owners, which CDC research invariably seems to suggest, but instead restricting the freedom of violent repeat offenders.”
For years, the Second Amendment community complained about CDC research which invariably seemed to reinforce the notion that restrictive gun controls could cure what was dubbed “a gun violence epidemic,” as though violent crime was a public health issue. Critics of that position such as SAF’s Gottlieb have argued the problem is crime, not germs.
About 30 years ago, Gottlieb and other gun rights leaders championed “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” a citizen initiative in Washington which focused on taking repeat offenders off the street and locking them up for life. Liberals opposed the measure, which not only passed overwhelmingly, but swept across the country with similar actions in other states.
Gottlieb noted that the reductions at CDC means the government will no longer treat gun ownership as a communicable disease.
“One complaint we’ve heard is that these cuts have ‘decimated’ staff responsible for so-called ‘gun violence research and prevention,’ but so far all of this research does not appear to have prevented a single violent crime,” he stated. “Instead, we see declarations that more research is needed, while anti-gunners use CDC data to erode Second Amendment rights. That sounds like a perpetual ‘make work’ effort to keep the public funding flowing while gun owners are essentially treated like plague carriers, or lepers.”
