Thursday, January 17, 2013

Let's "shoot" this sucker down

One would think there would be some sort of information on a subject like the risks or benefits of having a gun in the home. But such information is scarce. Funny that.
Kellermann found people turned those guns on themselves and others in the house far more often than on intruders. "In other words, a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense," he says.
That's a research finding conducted through funding from the CDC. And it is shocking, and demonstrates that the long-pushed notion of keeping a gun at home to be a very, very poor decision in many cases. Well we cannot let that kind of knowledge out.
Lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — held back some money from the CDC and made clear that no federal funds should be used to promote gun control.
Not good enough...
In 2003, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a Republican from Kansas, added language to the Justice Department's annual spending bill. It says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can't release information used to trace guns involved in crime to researchers and members of the public. It also requires the FBI to destroy records on people approved to buy guns within 24 hours.
No data, no research. America, ignorant by law -- and heavily armed.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

4 comments:

StonyPillow said...

We let the bullies arm themselves to the teeth.

We let the bullies make us stop keeping records on their bullying.

Now we’re letting the bullies wave their guns around and telling us we’d better respect their authority or else.

The real problem here isn’t the bullies.

Anonymous said...

Todd Tiahrt???

If you haven't seen it, I'm begging you to see Jon Stewart on last night's Daily show where he rips into the gun nuts - and Todd Tiahrt!!

So good! So, so, so very good!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-january-16-2013/there-goes-the-boom

donnah said...

Stony Pillow, you are absolutely right. We have allowed the NRA and related gun interests create a labyrinth of shady rules and laws that we can no longer navigate to stop them. We let it happen. We have to fix it.

pansypoo said...

the daily show did a 'rest of the story' JOURNALISM NOT BEING DONE BY TEVEE GNEWS. NOW, how do we FIX the NRA cockclocks?