"Gun Violence" Research

In 1979, gun control supporters within the U.S. Public Health Service started believing they could increase support for gun control by defining firearms as a disease. Studies conducted by gun control supporters in the public health field in the 1980s and early 1990s became the basis of anti-gun activists' claim that having a gun at home increases danger rather than provides protection. 

In 1993, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, of the Service's Centers for Disease Control (CDC), said that the Clinton administration wanted to "reframe the debate" about gun control to portray guns as a public health menace. In 1996, Congress prohibited the CDC from using taxpayer funds to underwrite research advocating gun control. In 2013, President Obama asked Congress to appropriate $10 million for anti-gun research, but Congress has wisely refused to do so. 

Gun control supporters in the public health field claim that gun violence is an "epidemic," but gun violence is alien to most people's experiences and the nation's murder rate has been cut by more than half since 1991, and in 2013 fell to perhaps an all-time low, as Americans' firearm acquisitions have soared.