The CDC Funds More Gun Research. Yea, So What?

Two years ago, Gun-control Nation exulted when the CDC put money into its budget to support research on gun violence and then awarded almost $8 million for grants to conduct studies on how and why Americans keep injuring themselves and others with guns.

The CDC has just announced a second wave of research funding that will result in $2.5 million being spent on four new research projects, the monies to go “to improve understanding of firearm injury, inform the development of innovative and promising prevention strategies, and rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of strategies to keep individuals, families, schools, and communities safe from firearm-related injuries, deaths, and crime.”

Taken together, these two funding efforts total slightly more than $10 million. Meanwhile, in the two years since the first dollars were expended, gun violence has reached levels that have never previously been achieved, with the 2020 number for gun-violence deaths more than 30% higher than annual counts in the years at the turn of the century and numbers for 2021 and 2022 promise to be higher still.

Since Friday, 138 people have been gunned down and killed, which is probably about half the actual number because the media sources used by our friends at the Gun Violence Archive are, by definition, incomplete, plus a number of the victims who are hospitalized with gun injuries will be released from medical treatment when they are dead.