Liars in Lab Coats – How Our Tax Dollars Should NOT Be Spent

By Alan J Chwick and Joanne D Eisen

AmmoLand Gun News
AmmoLand Gun News

USA –  -(Ammoland.com)- We all know that the gun control community has co-opted the phrase ‘common sense.’

What is ‘common sense’ to them, is foolishness to us.

It may be common sense for the gun control folks to want taxpayers to fund the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) anti-firearm research efforts.

But it’s foolish and counterproductive for us to permit the CDC to engage in fake science again, as they did in the past.

One can often hear the plaintive call for more firearms violence research and the funding that supports it. But the history of such research is rife with lies and distortions and it would be foolish to set the gun control crowd loose with our tax dollars, when their past has shown such disregard for the truth.

Our NRA is watching. They have a long institutional memory and they keep us alert.

ATTENTION: Medical Research On “Gun Violence” Is Contaminated With Propaganda, by Dave Hardy, Page 30, America’s 1st Freedom, December 2016.

Edouard_Manet_-_Le_Suicidé
Conflating suicide with murder confuses the definition of violence.

We shouldn’t let honesty rot in the trenches of debate, especially when some of that debate depends on today’s science that proves our Founders instincts to be correct. Yet, that’s exactly what gun controllers have done.

Gun controllers feel free to use fake science to lie in order to create fear among the ignorant populous. And their ‘scientists’ feel free to subvert science and misuse statistics in order to further their philosophy and harm the Second Amendment.

For example, among common misuses of data handling, they tend to include firearms suicides in the category of firearms violence.

When they do that addition, the number of fatalities, and so the amount of ‘firearms violence’, can easily double in many otherwise safe locations.

Conflating suicide with murder confuses the definition of violence.

That conclusion, if given as gospel and without any explanation by a respected individual, will create fear among the ignorant. And that fear might stampede a frightened public into acceptance of the enactment of additional restrictive firearms laws.

Do we need restrictive laws in states with little violence but with high rates of suicide or do we need better end of life medical care?

That, and many other misuses of numbers causes statistics to favor of gun control. Yet, in order to make beneficial public policy decisions, we need honesty most of all.

These lies were so egregious and embarrassing that in 1996 the Centers For Disease Control were barred from continuing their research.

When funding for the CDCs firearms research was denied again last December, 2015, many gun control advocates, panicking about the continuing loss of the CDCs funding, continued to moan about their loss and advocate for replacement of funding.

CDC’s Past Flawed Research

Bogus Research
Bogus Research

In the past, the CDC used our taxes to fund pseudo-scientific articles which were published in prestigious medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine.

The reputations of those journals aid in giving more weight to the conclusions of those articles than would publication in magazines or newspapers. Those conclusions were designed to create fear of the presence of guns and gun owners and to prove that greater restrictions will lead to a safer society.

Gun controllers may be liars but they are not stupid. They cleverly developed a body of fake science which, combined with photos of the bodies of dead children, still have a frightening effect on many Americans.

Such fake research ‘proves‘ that firearms ownership is dangerous to our families. The pro gun-control mainstream media happily parroted these lies and began to unfairly use epithets and lies to demonize gun owners. These pseudo-scientific lies were so morally offensive to gun owners and such a great deal of resistance developed that we see now an uncompromising split between the pro-gun and anti-gun communities.

We know there can be no compromise with liars and fools. If we compromise our principles based on gun control lies, we would become the liars and fools, and our families would suffer the consequences.

It’s worth repeating: We cannot compromise with the gun control crowd, especially when they want to use our money to destroy our culture of freedom by making false promises of safety. They are not and never will be trustworthy.

The Dickey amendment first denied funding in 1996 to the CDCs for advocating or promoting gun control. The CDCs have not been funding firearms research since then. With Obama’s final year of power looming, the American Psychological Association wrote a comprehensive review of those events from their view, leaving out much of the truth.

Here’s what really went down in 1996 that shows why and how funding for firearms research was eliminated.

The CDCs were funding research that was blatantly false. There were brazen distortions about the lack of usefulness of the Second Amendment and the harm caused to society by the Second Amendment.

Our cause gained strength and momentum in 1994 when an article, “Guns and Public Health : Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda” was published in the Tennessee Law Review. The authors meticulously examined many articles and showed how science had been subverted to an anti-gun philosophy by well paid ‘researchers’ and well known medical journals. The many articles discussed in this law journal article examined the ways numbers and data could be manipulated.

New England Journal of Medicine Fail
New England Journal of Medicine Fail

One of those articles was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and we’re using it here as an example because it is so obviously fake that it does not need much explanation.

Although the New England Journal of Medicine had an impeccable reputation, they have sullied that reputation, and we cannot believe that ignorance was involved because their blatant lying becomes so very easily obvious. In 1993 NEJM publishedGun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home” by Arthur Kellermann et al.

Among many other faults in the article, Kellermann et. al. cleverly changed the definition of ‘perpetrator’ into ‘victim’.

Arthur Kellermann
Arthur Kellermann should have been embarrassed by that faulty article and the many others he produced on that same topic.

It should have alerted even the most incompetent peer reviewer at the New England Journal of Medicine, but the peer reviewers did not care about truth. Even these many years later, we cannot believe the chutzbah of Kellermann and the editors of the NEJM.

How could they so embarrass themselves?

Perhaps, because Kellermann’s junk science conclusions are still trumpeted today by most media outlets, gambling with the journal’s reputation was worth the benefit gained by the gun control community.

We guess that the gain of decades of civilian fear of guns in civilian homes meant more than reputation, honesty and truth.

Kellermann et al stated, “Fifteen victims were killed under legally excusable circumstances. Four were shot by police acting in the line of duty. The rest were killed by another member of the household or a private citizen acting in self defense.”

Kellermann should have been embarrassed by that faulty article and the many others he produced on that same topic of the dangers of firearms when kept in private homes. But he was not.

Nevertheless, if the learned doctors at the NEJM could not tell fake from real, others could. Hearings were held in the US Congress in order to stop the flow of dollars. One can imagine how difficult it would be to eliminate funding, but the lies funded by the CDCs were so numerous and obvious that there could be little defense mounted by the gun control crowd.

They were caught pants down.

Dr. Miguel Faria was one of the witnesses who testified in Congress on March, 6, 1996. He stated, “Instead of providing a balanced, fair approach based on truth and objectivity, the medical journals … thwart the pursuit of free inquiry into scientific research….The CDCs provided politicized, result oriented research based on what can only be called ‘junk science’ to promote gun control as a panacea for solving the problem of violence.”

Funding was eliminated at that time, but the gun control community still moan about their loss without being honest about the reasons.

Dr. Faria later lamented, “A significant portion of the gun control agenda…comes from Dr. Kellermann’s landmark articles… [even though] much of the methodology , not to mention conclusions in the article, have been questioned by numerous investigators.”

The Present State of Bogus Research

Kellermann is still actively pro-gun control. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently gave him voice when he complained that, “background checks have an effect on inappropriate procurement of guns but private gun sales require no background check. Laws mandating a minimum age for gun ownership reduce gun fatalities, but firearms still pass freely from legal owners to juveniles and other legally proscribed individuals…”

And then Kellermann explained, “The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1996 – these being the years when the CDCs were funding firearms violence research.

This brings us to the present push from gun controllers to refund the violence research of the CDCs. The present resistance to any pro-control action requires some more frightening lies.

That’s because it has become obvious to many that a firearm in the home is better than a 911 call to police. There have been many natural disasters after which government help is nowhere to be found, and there is a growing understanding that terroristic acts have become a possibility.

Jay Dickey (R), a former House member, who wrote the original language which defunded the CDC in 1996, now says that he was wrong. That admission leaves a weakness which is sure to be exploited by gun controllers.

Dickey and Mark Rosenberg, formerly of the CDC, wrote, “We have …come to see that gun-violence research can be created, organized and conducted with two objectives: first, to preserve the rights of law-abiding citizens and legal gun owners and, second, to make our homes and communities safer. Well-structured research can be conducted to develop technologies and identify ways to achieve both objectives. We can get there only through research.”

Dickey and others may have forgotten the lies and malicious intentions of gun controllers. But constitutional attorney Eugene Volokh, warns us that, “many gun restriction advocates – including ones whose positions have often been seen as moderate – hope to ultimately impose broad restrictions indeed.”

To understand Volokh’s warning, we need only look at Richard Cohen’s Washington Post article where he calls gun owners moony over guns” and exhorts us to “See the bodies.” Cohen says, “The one thing we can do – the one thing we and every other nation know how to do- is restrict gun ownership.”

Their plan is to continue to cause Americans to fear their gun owning neighbors by using more fake science. They plan to increase firearms restrictions. They can squeeze the number of ‘safe’ gun owners until few of us will qualify.

For example, what do you think about raising the legal ownership age to 25? With so many young folks killing each other, it’s really a common sense idea that would improve safety in our neighborhoods, no?

The Future of Research Propaganda

Although the NRA, our strongest gun lobby, with ethe help of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, stopped the CDCs research in 1996, gun controllers want to begin again to fund the CDCs firearms research.

This became evident recently as the gun control crowd began their complaints.

The scientific community has been terrorized by the NRA,” recently complained Dr. Mark Rosenberg, formerly of the CDCs.

During a January 21, 2016 demonstration of democratic Senators and “renowned” researchers at the US Capitol, Senator Charles Schumer (D) stated, “It is absurd, backwards, and dangerous that the CDC is barred from researching the gun violence epidemic that is plaguing our country…Ending this ban on CDC research is a logical, and necessary, first step.”

And in March,17 2016, the LA Times reports, “With Congress deadlocked over a proposal to fund gun violence prevention research, California lawmakers are making moves to establish a state-funded national center on the issue at a university campus.”

Will our Republican majority hold firm when the push begins?  They have been known to falter. We need to watch and keep them accountable, because truth depends on it.

We don’t believe that gun control advocates are willing to change their stripes and conduct truthful research. We know that the best way to predict the future is to study the past. We know that many prestigious entities and people have risked their reputations on absurd lies and gotten away with it. We would want to see a repudiation of past lies before we casually give money to liars.

They are charlatans whose lies are still believed and spread by American media.

We would want to see confessions of guilt. We would want to hear apologies and remorse. We would want oversight. We especially want to see the ‘scientists’ and the media acknowledge the errors of their ways.

Daily News Calls Republicans Irrational, Deceitful, Blood-Soaked Liars over Guns
Daily News Calls Republicans Irrational, Deceitful, Blood-Soaked Liars over Guns

But that’s not likely. On January 6, 2016, the Daily News on their cover, mistakenly [or deliberately?] confusing Republicans with American gun owners, called us irrational, deceitful, blood-soaked liars and the Republican party specifically, “the party of pro-death”.

There can be no further discussion under these circumstances. We want honesty in discussion, and honesty is missing.

So should CDCs funding be missing, so be it. That’s our common sense opinion.

About the author:

Alan J Chwick has been involved with firearms much of his life, and is the Managing Coach (Ret.) of the Freeport Junior (Marksmanship) Club, Division of the Freeport NY Revolver & Rifle Association, Freeport, NY. He has now escaped from New York State to South Carolina. Alan J Chwick – [email protected] | @iNCNF

Joanne D Eisen, DDS (Ret.) practices dentistry on Long Island, NY. She has collaborated and written on firearm politics for the past 25-years, and is a Senior Fellow in Criminology at the Independence Institute in Denver, CO. She has also escaped from New York State, but to Virginia. Joanne D Eisen – [email protected]

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Macofjack

There is a lot of science out there that is more BS than science.

Robert B Young, MD

Mr. Chwick & Dr. Eisen —

Thank you for the shout out!
We couldn’t agree more with everything you say, and will continue our part of this fight.

Robert B Young, MD
Editor, Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO.us)

Thomas Beckham

if you must lie or obfuscate to support your position you have no valid argument. Lies and distortion don’t become facts no matter their source. Germs are the business of the CDC not guns.

Wild Bill

I can not believe that a liberal like Gil would use unacceptable phraseology like “… call a spade a spade…” Either he is ignorant of what that phrase means or he is a racist of the worst order. The black men that I know and served with would gut him like a fish if he made that reference in front of them. Clean it up young man!

Gil

People understand more cars equals more deaths but no one much complains about cars – even if they take more lives than guns. By the same token, more guns also means more shootings.

Macofjack

Gil – more guns does not mean more shooting, More stupid people means more shootings. 100,000,000 guns will not jump up and shoot anyone any more than 1 gun will.

Gil

People don’t get shot unless there are guns.

Macofjack

No they get stabbed, run over and any number of other things that can kill them. May you never need a gun and not have one, your guilt would drive you mad!

Gil

Geez. Why not call a spade a spade and call deaths from guns not related to self-defence as acceptable losses? You know the same way people don’t really care about how many deaths are caused by car ownership.