In 1996, the Dickey Amendment passed as a rider on an omnibus spending bill (otherwise President Clinton might not have signed it) prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control from research on firearms unless the research was related to safety; it very specifically said that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control” . The $2.6 million of their budget that was allocated to firearms research was redirected to studying traumatic brain injuries. The model that the CDC used for giving out research grants investigating gun violence was guaranteed to cause political controversy, as it was to treat the presence of guns in America similar to any other public health problem, like smoking or an infectious disease spread by human behavior like HIV. In response, a majority pro-gun Congress used its power of the purse to exercise control over the Executive Branch in our constitutional system of checks and balances.
The issue goes as far back as 1979, when the CDC’s parent agency the U.S. Public Health Service stated that its goal was “to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership, starting with a 25% reduction by the turn of the century” (Bell, 2013). However, the use of constitutional checks and balances did not happen until 1996 after the NRA-led takeover of Congress in 1994.
This is nothing new.
In 1996, the Dickey Amendment passed as a rider on an omnibus spending bill (otherwise President Clinton might not have signed it) prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control from research on firearms unless the research was related to safety; it very specifically said that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control” . The $2.6 million of their budget that was allocated to firearms research was redirected to studying traumatic brain injuries. The model that the CDC used for giving out research grants investigating gun violence was guaranteed to cause political controversy, as it was to treat the presence of guns in America similar to any other public health problem, like smoking or an infectious disease spread by human behavior like HIV. In response, a majority pro-gun Congress used its power of the purse to exercise control over the Executive Branch in our constitutional system of checks and balances.
The issue goes as far back as 1979, when the CDC’s parent agency the U.S. Public Health Service stated that its goal was “to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership, starting with a 25% reduction by the turn of the century” (Bell, 2013). However, the use of constitutional checks and balances did not happen until 1996 after the NRA-led takeover of Congress in 1994.