SAF Applauds Staff Cuts in CDC’s ‘Gun Violence’ Division

The CDC shouldn’t be an entity we look upon with disdain as gun rights advocates. I mean, no one should look at it that way…assuming they’re doing their job correctly.

But they haven’t. They’ve been beating the gun control drum for decades on some level, including claiming they couldn’t fund research into violent crime because they weren’t allowed to use taxpayer money to push gun control.

So it’s kind of satisfying to see some changes being made by the Trump administration at the CDC, and they’re changes anti-gunners don’t like. They can learn to deal with disappointment.

From a press release sent by the Second Amendment Foundation.

While the gun prohibition lobby is lamenting reported reductions in staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Second Amendment Foundation is applauding the Trump administration cuts, which will hopefully take the CDC out of the gun control arena, at least for the foreseeable future.

“With these reductions,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “the government is no longer treating gun ownership as a communicable disease.”

The staff reductions, announced by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have caused tremors within the gun control community. Critics are complaining the cuts will undermine the federal government’s ability to combat so-called “gun violence” research. 

“Ever since the CDC inserted itself into the gun rights debate,” Gottlieb observed, “the agency has spent millions of dollars to promote the notion that gun-related violence is a public health issue, and they’ve mostly gotten away with it, thanks largely to their allies in the media treating everything they say as gospel. But it’s not a ‘health crisis,’ it’s a crime problem, and the antidote is not restricting the rights of law-abiding gun owners, which CDC research invariably seems to suggest, but instead restricting the freedom of violent repeat offenders. 

“One complaint we’ve heard is that these cuts have ‘decimated’ staff responsible for so-called ‘gun violence research and prevention,’ but so far all of this research does not appear to have prevented a single violent crime,” he stated. “Instead, we see declarations that more research is needed, while anti-gunners use CDC data to erode Second Amendment rights. That sounds like a perpetual ‘make work’ effort to keep the public funding flowing while gun owners are essentially treated like plague carriers, or lepers.”

Look, the truth of the matter is that the American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding any effort that seeks to undermine a constitutionally protected right. We’d find it just as offensive if the CDC were funding biased research that tried to argue that free speech needs to be curtailed for some reason.

It’s bad enough that anyone would fund such a thing, but if someone like Michael Bloomberg wants to spend his money that way, he’s got the right to do so.

But that’s not the issue. The issue is the money we’re forced to give the government or face imprisonment for failing to do so then being directed toward advancing a particular ideology.

And let’s be real here, we know good and well that all of this research is incredibly biased. The laws of probability alone suggest there should be more findings that suggest guns are beneficial than there actually are, which alone tells us that either the research is cooked from the start or pro-gun results are being sat on, or some combination of the two.

Now the CDC is losing some of the staff they use to advance the idea that gun control is our savior, and I’m sitting here laughing at it.

I’m sure someone will try to do a story to try and make us feel bad about these people losing their jobs, but if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes, and signing on for such problematic effort on the taxpayer dime is most definitely playing stupid games.