With the stroke of his royal pen, President Barack Obama declared that federal law in the form of a 17-year congressional funding ban on gun-control “research” at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was trumped by his personal decree through an executive order restoring the CDC’s junk science agenda.
Were I to choose a single word to define this action, it would be “outlaw.” The law forbidding expenditures by CDC to promote gun control still stands. It cannot be erased by an executive order. But this is President Obama, his rule and his rules.
As with so many other Obama executive actions disregarding federal law or ignoring Congress or the courts, this one has born poisonous fruit in the form of a voluminous manifesto. In this case, it’s entitled, Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearms-Related Violence.
Produced by the National Academy of Sciences (for the CDC), the research agenda was “supported by awards between the National Academy of Sciences and both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the CDC Foundation, the California Endowment, the Joyce Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, one anonymous donor …”
Anonymous donor? New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg or George Soros perhaps? After all, the deep-pocket largesse of the Joyce Foundation is the only reason the Violence Policy Center can keep its doors open.
To give you an idea of what is coming as a result of massive financial commingling of federal tax dollars, hidden billionaire donors and gun-ban foundations, let me give you a taste of the “Alice in Wonderland” world to come.
Under the heading, “Firearms-Related Violence as a Public Health Issue,” the report demands that “a public health approach should be incorporated into the strategies used to prevent future harm and injuries. Violence, including firearm related violence, has been shown to be contagious. Recognizing this, the academic community has suggested that research examine violence much like is done for contagious diseases.”
How twisted is that? Gun ownership treated as a contagious disease.
The central purpose of the proposed “research” should be intensely alarming for all Americans who believe in the Second Amendment.
The single most dangerous “research” among the CDC findings is a demand for collection of personal, private information on all law-abiding firearm owners and our guns. In the vision of the gun control researchers, such data would form the basis of the projected “science.” Throughout the document—no, it’s a manifesto—are references to the creation of this centralized database on the “scope and motivations for gun acquisition ownership and use and how they are distributed across subpopulations.” Subpopulations? Criminals, youth and “the general population.”
Of course, the only information that can be collected and centralized will be data on the law abiding. Criminals are, after all, in the shadows.
This notion of an all-invasive, all-seeing federal database is the core of every subset of research proposed. The agenda is spiked with similar references seeking “the exact number and distribution of guns currently in homes … Basic information about gun possession, acquisition, and storage is lacking. No single database captures the total number, locations, and types of firearms and firearms owners in the United States.”
“The exact number and distribution of guns and gun types in the United States are unknown, but for each of these populations, it would be valuable to have counts of total guns owned, their attributes [i.e., general type, caliber, firing mechanism], how the guns were acquired [i.e., purchased, received as a gift, traded for, stolen, etc.] and information on the sources of the guns [i.e., licensed gun dealers, friends or relatives, gun traffickers, owners of stolen guns, and so on].”
This is the worldview of gun ownership as a “public health” disease.
Want more proof of the direction of this illegal Obama effort?
If you want a simple summation of what the new CDC “public health” newspeak means, look to the past, because when it comes to the CDC, the past is the future.
In the Jan. 4, 1994, American Medical News, Dr. Katherine Christhoff, who headed a lobbying group established by the Joyce Foundation to support and disseminate the 1990s CDC agenda, wrote: “Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.”
And at the beginning of the assault on the Second Amendment, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the agency’s firearm guru, summed up the mindset of most CDC “firearms violence” scientists in an interview with the Washington Post saying: “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes … dirty, deadly, and banned.”
Dr. Rosenberg recently lauded the president’s executive order and said that because of NRA’s long-standing support for congressional restrictions, “The scientific community has been terrorized by the NRA.”
The CDC’s “revolutionary” mindset marked much of the so-called “research” produced by the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. It was purely bogus science providing political and media fodder for promoting a whole host of gun control schemes, all under the rubric of “public health.”
Dr. Miguel Faria, a distinguished professor and neurosurgeon who served on CDC’s Injury Research Grant Review Committee from 2002 through 2005, described that “revolutionary” climate inside the CDC in a January 20, 2013, interview in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
“Suffice to say, that the work of gun control researchers in public health had a proclivity toward reaching preordained conclusions, results-oriented research that was tainted, and based on what can only be characterized as junk science. What was always the preordained conclusion? That guns were bad and had no benefits, that guns and bullets were pathogens that needed to be eradicated, or at least severely restricted from the civilian population.”
Virtually all of the “gun violence” product of the Center was so dishonest, so politically skewed, that Congress in 1997 enshrined into law a prohibition on CDC funding: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Until January 2013—and the Obama diktat—the CDC mostly obeyed that law and the restriction held.
But on the 16th of January, President Barack Obama, with his executive order, put the CDC, with its history of rabid anti-gun “research,” back in the “junk science” business. Congress be damned.
The press announcement covering the Obama decree called gun violence “a serious public health issue” saying that “a broader public health perspective is imperative,” and demanded, “continued development of gun violence prevention strategies.”
Everything in this unlawful action—in clear contravention of the congressional ban—will require older gun owners to dust off their newspeak dictionaries, and younger gun owners to learn the real and hidden meanings of this “public health” gun-ban vocabulary.
We will be hearing a lot about “intervention” and “intervention strategies.”
Think of it as Obama’s scheme to intervene in the Second Amendment. Intervene in your private possession of firearms. Intervene in your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Again, to understand where this is headed, you have to go back to the origins of the funding cutoff. Here are more bits of “scientific” medical wisdom on gun ownership by prominent public health thinkers: Patrick O’Carroll, a CDC official involved in the “research,” wrote in the February 3, 1989, Journal of the American Medical Association: “We’re going to systematically build the case that owning firearms causes deaths.”
The CDC’s Rosenberg—again, the physician spearheading the guns as a public health menace effort—co-authored the agency’s Public Health Policy for Preventing Violence which recommended two public health strategies: “…allowing only police, guards, and the military to have guns, or the outright prohibition of gun ownership.”
Furthermore, he was quoted in a December 9, 1993, Rolling Stone interview explaining the goals of the CDC effort which he said, “… envisions a long term campaign … to convince Americans that guns are, first and foremost, a public health menace.”
From this past, expect the future to be worse. The ultimate goal of the gun ban “scientific community” is to make the “gun ownership is a disease” mantra into politically settled science.
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