8/28/21 CDC Chief Walensky Talks Guns and Public Health

There's a reason why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control hasn't studied guns and their effect on the nation's public health: They tried before and suffered a drastic funding cut in 1997, when the National Rifle Association persuaded Congress to cut its funding for gun research.

Now, Rochelle Walensky, the physician who heads up the CDC, is in a position former CDC directors would envy: The National Rifle Association, a political-donation megastar for conservative legislators, is stumbling and relatively weak.

During the Trump years, the NRA got mixed up with a Russian spy, Marina Butino, who was allegedly trying to use the group to set up a connection to the GOP. For the second year, its national is -- or was -- scheduled as Zoom calls. This year's meeting has been canceled altogether. The group has tried to file for bankruptcy, and New York's Attorney General has filed suit to dissolve the NRA altogether.

Oddly enough, the door to gun research was prized open in part by President Donald Trump, who, in 2018, signed a government spending bill that allowed the CDC to pursue gun violence research. Congress followed with $25 million split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

Walensky once mentored a medical student who was affected by the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That student went on to co-found the Gun Violence Prevention Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. The experience drives Walensky at a deep level.

Walensky is pursuing a broad base of support for the research."Generally, the word gun, for those who are worried about research in this area, is followed by the word control, and that's not what I want to do here," Walensky said. "I'm not here about gun control. I'm here about preventing gun violence and gun death."

She also noted that "We cannot understand the research of firearm violence, firearm injury, without embracing, wholeheartedly, the firearm-owning community."

The CDC is spending $2.2 million to create a surveillance tracker for gunshot-wound cases in hospital emergency rooms that works almost in real time, and it collects data on how the injury occurred: self-inflicted, accidental, or from assault. Walensky, however, wants to pursue the issue on all fronts, starting from the reason people buy guns to begin with.

This summer, an average of 200 people have been killed each weekend by gun use. It's time for gun research.

It's been time for a very, very long time.

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What do you think the CDC should do early in its gun research?

What do you think of Walensky's idea of "embracing, whole-heartedly, the firearm-owning community?" Is $12.5 million each for the CDC and NIH adequate? Is it a good start? 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/27/health/cdc-gun-research-walensky/index.html Illustration: "Hand Gun" by Lala Photography at JoLi Studios Colchester is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0