Blackout: How the NRA suppressed gun violence research
Zachary Roth, @zackroth
6:00 am on 01/14/2013
In 1993, a group of researchers published a study that challenged the most basic assumptions of many gun owners: That owning a gun makes you safer.
The study, rigorously conducted by ten credentialed experts, and appearing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, found instead that the reverse is true. “Although firearms are often kept in homes for personal protection, this study shows that the practice is counter-productive,” the authors wrote. “Our data indicate that keeping a gun in the home is independently associated with an increase in the risk of homicide in the home.”
The previous year, the same researchers had published a similar study finding the same link between gun ownership and suicide. Both studies were funded by the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Arthur Kellermann, who was the lead researcher on the studies, said they weren’t intended as briefs for gun control, but simply to provide information that could help people make rational, evidence-based decisions about whether to keep a weapon at home.
“This was about whether you want to have a loaded handgun in a house with a curious 5-year-old, or an angry spouse, or a depressed grandparent who may be contemplating suicide,” Kellermann, a Tennessee native who says he learned to shoot a gun at the age of 10 and now directs the RAND Corporation’s health research division, told MSNBC.com in an interview.
Even so, the gun-rights community reacted as if the studies were a declaration of war. Calling the research flawed and politically motivated, it launched a campaign to pressure government agencies not to fund further work on gun violence.
That pushback from gun-rights supporters sent a not-so-subtle message to the CDC—as well as any other government agency thinking of funding gun violence research, Kellerman said: “You toucha this topic, I breaka your face.”
