by Tatiana Rodriguez ‘23

According to data found from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “over 100 people, on average, are killed by firearms in the U.S. everyday.” Despite such statistics, there is wide political disagreement about the accessibility and prevalence of guns in the United States. In addition to those that believe that there is a constitutional right to gun ownership, some argue that possession of guns actually makes a person safer. After years of neglecting an analysis of the statistics of gun violence, the CDC will now investigate the steps needed to reduce the number of deaths that firearms cause. 

The controversy surrounding guns in America has dimmed the discussion about it in the government for years, which led to Republicans and Democrats having separate opinions on guns. Democrats generally believe that guns should be harder to obtain because of its dangers. However, Republicans have taken many steps to ensure that the government does not have the power to look more into depth of gun violence. 

In 1996, Congressional Republicans passed the The Dickey Amendment that prevented government agencies, specifically the CDC, from using federal funds to advocate for gun control or even researching the public health costs of gun violence. For the last 25 years, the congressional amendment has stopped the CDC from studying gun violence. In 2018, however, Congress clarified that the ban on federal funding being used for preventing gun violence did not apply to researching the impact of firearms.

Even after this clarification, the CDC had to wait until last month for these federal funding changes to be approved. The agency is now able to start the initiative of researching gun violence, including the analysis of why someone would want a gun and if it is beyond self-defense or if people buy guns for reasons to hurt themselves or others. 

The CDC provides basic data, for example, that ¨there were 39,707 firearm related deaths in the United States in 2019.¨ Even though such data could be found on the CDC website, the agency previously could not look extensively into the reasons and causes for these deaths. The CDC will now use  resources to understand and research the underlying causes of gun violence; for example what patterns there are in criminal shootings and suicides. They will also research the reason for every gun-related death. The research by the CDC also may lead to a greater understanding of the effectiveness of gun laws. For example, background checks provide some gun control, but many deaths by guns are suicides by people without criminal records.. This is one of the problems that the CDC will be able to look into now that it is  able to use federal funding for research on gun violence. Some experts say that even though there is much more left to do to actually take action on the toll of gun violence, the first step is understanding the true impact of guns in America.