The U.S. Spends More Studying Hyper Dogs Than Gun Violence

The CDC currently spends around $100,000 a year studying gun violence.

In 2015, three government agencies joined forces to spend a combined $10 million dollars to study hyper dogs (spoiler alert: professionally trained dogs remain calmer under pressure than excitable pet dogs with little training).

For the first time since 1960, guns are killing people at the same rate as automobiles. Yet, the CDC hasn’t been given significant funding to study gun violence since 1996 – when the NRA and Congress enacted the Dickey-Wicker Amendment to prevent the CDC from studying it.

An executive order following the tragedy in Newton lifted the restrictions placed on the CDC, but the status quo remains. In his last two budget proposals, President Obama has requested $10 million dollars to fund CDC studies on gun violence – only to have this modest request blocked by Congress.

Shouldn’t We Be Studying This?

Auto accident deaths and gun deaths are occurring at the same rate.  What does this mean? Guns are killing as many people as cars. Just look at this graph from the Washington Post.

Congress refuses to earmark just $10 million dollars to study something that is killing 91 Americans every day.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) alone has an annual research budget of $331,000,000!

It can’t be the money that’s the problem.  While the language of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment never explicitly prohibited the agency from studying gun violence, it has effectively eliminated any major study into it. Young researchers were warned that studying gun violence would end their careers. CDC directors were complicit with the NRA’s demands. Any gun study that did manage to make it through was sent to the NRA to be vetted before being published.

However, in case money is the problem, here are a few frivolous that could potentially be cut to pay for gun violence research:

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That’s a total of $10,774,771.  Nearly three quarters of a million dollars more than the President wants to spend to study gun violence. While the idea of a Mantis Shrimp fight club sounds like the coolest study I have ever heard, I’d have to think that earmarking resources to study gun violence is a little bit more important.

*Featured Image by Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (Stop Gun Violence) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons