PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Ben Carson open to letting CDC research gun violence :: 11/02/2015
Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson said on Friday that the Centers for Disease Control should be able to conduct research on the causes of gun violence, a position that put him at odds with America's gun lobby and congressional Republicans. Asked after a speech here if the prohibition on that sort of research should be lifted, Carson said he was always interested in the collection of data.
"I say more information is better," he said. "Whatever it is. Put the information on the table, and let's make decisions based on real evidence."
That stance was not shared by many Republicans. In 1996, after the National Rifle Association sounded alarms about alleged bias in CDC studies, the new Republican majority zeroed out funding for research on gun issues. Ever since, in Republican Congresses and in Democratic Congresses that fretted about angering the NRA's membership, there's been a prohibition on CDC funds being used for gun violence studies.
Fear and funding shortfalls remain at the CDC, even though the agency was ordered to resume firearm studies after the Connecticut school massacre.
"The CDC is there to look at diseases that need to be dealt with to protect public health,” former Speaker of the House John Boehner told PRI's Todd Zwillich in 2013. “I’m sorry, but a gun is not a disease. Guns don’t kill people — people do. And when people use weapons in a horrible way, we should condemn the actions of the individual and not blame the action on some weapon.”
Carson had not talked about the CDC angle until now, but he had been criticized for pro-gun rights stances. After a mass shooting this month in Oregon, Carson repeatedly said that people needed to band together to disarm shooters, and that the threat of gun confiscation was grimmer than the threat of gun violence. At one point, he made an argument that the NRA had used for as long as it had lobbied against CDC gun violence funding: that the Holocaust was enabled in part by peaceful Jews being deprived of gun rights. And like many conservatives, Carson said the roots of the shooting were in ill mental health, not access to guns.
"We need to be studying these individuals, being able to figure out who is the dangerous person so we can intervene, not only to save the lives of people who are being shot, but to save the shooter," he said.
