National
Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre is shown at the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md.NJ.com
Responding to the toddler’s death, Kentucky lawmaker Robert Damron said, “Why single out firearms? Why not talk about all the other things that endanger children, too?”
Scientific research might show Mr. Damron that, while access to pools, bathtubs and cribs dwarfs access to guns, the former do not kill as surely by drowning or suffocation as does a firearm held by a small child. However, the National Rifle Association has blocked all scientific study into the causes of gun deaths since the mid-1990s. So Damron knows what the NRA wants him to know.
Last year, Congress spent nothing to study 32,000 gun deaths, while it appropriated $860 million to NHTSA to study 34,000 vehicle fatalities. In fact, Congress has spent nothing every year since 1996 by inserting NRA-written language in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget, prohibiting any study that may be used to “advocate gun control.”
The 1960s auto industry blamed drivers for traffic deaths.
“Then we learned we could modify the product … and we changed the consequences of bad driving. We could do the same thing with firearms,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, of the Cal-Davis Violence Prevention Program. “The firearm industry is where the auto industry was, which is fighting regulation tooth and nail.”
“For policy to be effective, it needs to be based on evidence,” Wintemute told the Times. “The NRA and its allies in Congress have largely succeeded in choking off the development of evidence upon which that policy could be based.”
