Spotlight: U.S. federal studies on gun violence banned by Congress for 19 years

Days after the South Carolina black church massacre in June, a congressional proposal to lift an almost two-decade ban on federal studies about gun violence was raised in Congress without much fanfare. Neither was its blockage.

According to Politico, a U.S. daily specialized in reporting Congress news, the House Appropriations Committee blocked a proposal on June 24 that would have reversed a ban passed by Congress in 1996 on funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study gun violence.

In a report by the Republican-controlled committee on the proposal, Republicans defended the panel's decision as to protect the rights granted by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

"The restriction is to prevent activity that would undertake activities (to include data collection) for current or future research, including under the title 'gun violence prevention,' that could be used in any manner to result in a future policy, guidelines, or recommendations to limit access to guns, ammunition, or to create a list of gun owners," said the report.

The news remained little known till 99 days later, when a grim-faced, chafed and frustrated U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday blasted the Congress for obstructing data collection on gun violence studies.

"We have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths," said Obama in his 15th televised speech on mass shooting in the United States since taking office.

"How can that be?" he asked.

In the 1990s, the CDC used its budget to conduct two high-profile studies which concluded that the risks of having a loaded gun at home outweigh the benefits by studying collected data.

Realizing that such studies would be used as catalysts for gun safety reforms in the nation, the powerful lobbyist group the National Rifle Association (NRA) pressured the Congress to kill such federal-funded studies by cutting the fund.

In 1996, the NRA succeeded.

Since 1996, the CDC's appropriation bill had explicitly stipulated that none of the funds made available to the agency "may be used to advocate or promote gun control," and the CDC hasn't done any such studies since then.

In 2009, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) also conducted a similar study which found that a person carrying a gun was about 4.5 times more likely to be shot in conflicts than the one without a gun.

Again, two years later, restrictive funding for the NIH was imposed by Congress.

In a recent interview with U.S. media, a spokesman from the NRA said his organization was pushing for cutting the federal funds flowing into gun violence studies because "they shouldn't be using public funds to do it."

Despite the absence of large-scale and authoritative studies of gun violence, studies conducted by individual organizations had found that the presence of guns were associated with an increasing possibility of gun-related death.

However, as experts said, many questions related to gun violence remain unanswered, including whether allowing people to carry weapons in certain public places affects the number of deaths.

Without collected data from gun violence studies, various remedies to mass shooting offered by pro-gun politicians seemed enticing but also insidious.

In the wake of a shooting incident in a cinema in Louisiana this July, former Texas Governor and former U.S. presidential candidate Rick Perry told media that "gun-free zones" were "a bad idea" and U.S. citizens should be permitted to carry weapons while watching movies in cinemas.

It surely did not sound like a smart idea. Enditem