For the first time in decades, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) will restart research into the gun violence epidemic across the U.S. CDC researchers will be on a mission to collect enough data to enable the agency to create solutions to prevent gun-related deaths, accidental gun deaths, and/or suicides.
CDC director Rochelle Walensky spoke with CNN over the weekend and revealed her new plan to research guns and gun-related violence.
“Every day, we turn on the news, and there are more young people dying,” Walensky said. “I swore to the president and to this country that I would protect your health. This is clearly one of those moments, one of those issues, that’s harming America’s health.”
The CDC has remained silent for decades about guns, tackling other epidemics as tens of thousands of people die from firearm-related injuries every year.
The Gun Violence Archive, a monitoring platform of gun violence and mass shootings, recently recorded 452 mass shootings in 41 different states (and Washington D.C.) in the 236 days of 2021. For comparison, in all of 2020, there were 393 mass shootings.
GVA’s mass shooting map shows most of the shootings occurred East of the Mississippi.
Breaking down GVA’s numbers, the U.S. is averaging nearly two mass shootings per day.
Walensky said, “something has to be done about this,” adding that Americans are sick and tired of turning on the nightly news and hearing about mass shooting stories.
So her strategy is simple: Restart the CDC’s gun research arm that will find out, based on “science,” why gun violence is rampant.
“My job is to understand and evaluate the problem. To understand the scope of the problem. To understand why this happens and what are the things that can make it better,” she said
Walensky hopes that gun owners don’t associate the CDC’s upcoming research with “gun control.”
She continued: “I’m not here about gun control. I’m here about preventing gun violence and gun death.”
This brings us to her boss, President Biden, whose administration members are on a mission to limit or ban guns.
We recently laid out, in a gun policy note titled “Puzzle Pieces All Laid Out” – How ATF Has Plan To Classify Semi-Automatic Rifles As “Machine Guns” that stricter gun control is coming with and if the ATF could have it their way, ban the AR-15 platform.
Liberal politicians could use Walensky’s research as statistics to make the case why gun control is needed to reduce mass shootings.
So the (rhetorical) question we ask is: Why now is the CDC suddenly focused on trying to tackle another “epidemic”: gun violence, with an administration that desperately wants more gun control?