When Bernie Sanders voted to strip funding for gun research
The dominant Republican position on the Second Amendment has hardened into zealotry. As the Washington Post put it after the San Bernardino shooting last December, candidates have moved from gun rights to gun pride. “You don’t stop bad guys by taking away our guns. You stop bad guys by using our guns,” Ted Cruz told a crowd at a shooting range late last year. The requisite photo op showed him checking out a hefty-looking handgun.
So it’s even more jarring when a progressive Democrat seeking the highest office in the land hews to some of the same positions on guns as the GOP. At least, that’s how Bernie Sanders voted in 1996 on the crucial issue of research into the roots of gun violence and the effect of gun ownership on public health.
In 1993, a groundbreaking study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that gun ownership was a risk factor for homicides in the home. The research, by epidemiologist Arthur Kellermann, provided evidence that gun violence is indeed a serious public health issue. The study made history in another way: it enraged the National Rifle Association, which launched a campaign to punish the agency that funded the study, the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention. Congress caved under NRA lobbying pressure and inserted language in the 1996 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”
Written by former US Representative Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican, the so-called Dickey Amendment has had a decided chilling effect on research on gun violence for decades.
Dickey, now safely removed from the toxic environs of a divided Congress, has come to his senses and repudiated his own measure. “Research could have been continued on gun violence without infringing on the rights of gun owners,” he wrote in a recent letter. “Somehow or some way we should slowly but methodically fund such research until a solution is reached. Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution.” Although President Obama issued an executive order to allow the CDC to resume research, Congress has consistently refused to authorize funding.
All of this brings us to Sanders, and his voting record as a Vermont congressman in the 1990s. In an effort to repeal the Dickey Amendment and restore funding to the CDC, Nita Lowey, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, and Republican congressman Mike Castle of Delaware introduced an amendment to provide $2.6 million to the CDC for “issues related to firearms use.” Although a majority of House Democrats supported the proposal when it was introduced in July 1996, Sanders apparently had other ideas. The Independent congressman voted with Republicans to defeat the amendment, 263-158.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2016/02/26/esandersloweyamendment/1vtfzUtW0MxjtiYSSbbMvK/story.html
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