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: Re-committed to APPROPRIATIONS
Last Action Date: May 6, 2024
Gun ownership not a disease says 2A advocate as push continues for CDC studies :: 02/13/2016
The last line of a story on so-called “gun violence research” appearing Wednesday afternoon on the Seattle Times website may explain why the continued push to restore federal funding for such research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is such a sticking point with Second Amendment advocates.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, summed it up in six words. “Gun ownership is not a disease,” he told the newspaper.
However, having a firearm in an emergency just might be the kind of “first aid” that saves the day. If criminal violence is a plague, legally-armed citizens just might provide an antidote.
The article was about Harborview Medical Center’s Dr. Fred Rivara and his two-decade battle to lift the ban on gun research by the CDC aimed at “the public-health effects of gun violence.” That ban was imposed when gun rights organizations, primarily the National Rifle Association, began crying foul that the research seemed invariably tilted toward pushing a gun control agenda.
That’s precisely what Gottlieb told the Times: “The problem we had was with how past money was spent with the CDC. The research was aimed to push an agenda. If you had doctors who were doing responsible research that wasn’t biased, I don’t think there would be objections to funding it.”
Typically ignored in the discussion about CDC funding and the clamp down on gun-related research is a 2013 report that was done by executive order from President Barack Obama. That may be due to some of the report’s findings, best detailed by Guns & Ammo back in August 2013.
According to that report, “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence.” Here’s another tidbit: “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
That last bit is important as it relates to a story appearing on KIRO’s Eyewitness News last night. It was a piece that looked at workplace violence and the potential for an “active shooter” scenario to unfold. “KIRO 7 News found out there are almost no specific rules about how your office should be prepared,” the report said. “So KIRO 7 sat down with a tactic expert who is all about empowering you and your employer to become your own first responders.”
Significantly missing from the narrative is self-defense with a firearm. Last year, when Washington, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that if people caught up in a mass shooting saw an opportunity to “take out” the shooter, they should do that, it raised eyebrows. How does one “take out” an active shooter without something they can use to shoot back?
The deadly attack at the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard by former Seattle resident Aaron Alexis in September 2013 using a cut down Remington 870 pump shotgun might have ended more quickly had someone been able to fire back. Police killed Alexis about an hour after the incident erupted. He murdered an armed security guard and took his pistol. What he would not have been expecting would be to draw fire from someone thought to be unarmed. It’s a “what if” theory that gets kicked around in the aftermath of any such event.
To make sense of this, and the research Rivara reportedly wishes the CDC could resume, one has to acknowledge that bad people do bad things with guns, but good people aren’t responsible for that and should not be penalized for it. That’s because good people with guns can do good things, too.
For example, one week ago today, an armed citizen was credited with saving the life of an Upper Darby, Pennsylvania police officer, according to the Philadelphia Daily News. About four years ago, a Texas cop was saved when an armed citizen shot the man who was trying to kill him in a trailer park gun battle, detailed at PoliceOne.com.
The Seattle Times story noted that in 2014, there were 33,599 firearms-related deaths in this country. What wasn’t mentioned was that the majority of those were suicides. To that end, Gottlieb and the NRA have the upper hand by supporting legislation currently moving in Olympia that is aimed at suicide prevention. Gottlieb had personally been working on the effort since early last year, and now Substitute House Bill 2793 has a good chance of becoming law.
Some anti-gunners in Olympia might be quietly wincing about this bill. They can cringe all they want to, especially if someone hits them with one of their favorite arguments supporting any willy-nilly gun control law on the landscape: “Hey, if it saves just one life, it’s worth the effort.”
