New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Mayors: Do gun research right

Major gun control groups and some Democrats want Congress to undo long-standing restrictions on federal funding of gun-related research, saying they have blotted out objective information on a public health priority.

In a forthcoming report shared with POLITICO, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, co-founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, argues that “the federal government has surrendered its leadership over this area of crucial importance to public safety, shutting down firearm-related research in key agencies and all but allowing the gun lobby to shape our collective knowledge about gun violence.” Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and later the National Institutes of Health have faced restrictions on gun-related research.


Top Bloomberg advisers met last week with Vice President Joe Biden’s working group on a legislative response to the Newtown, Conn., massacre, and made familiar recommendations, such as banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring mandatory background checks for all gun buyers and making gun trafficking a federal crime, said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

But the group is also urging the administration to do away with the “Tiahrt amendments,” named after former Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.). He was the original sponsor of what became a raft of riders on budget bills that restrict the collection and distribution of crime-gun data by Department of Justice agencies including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And the group opposes restrictions that have effectively shut off most firearms research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since the mid-1990s.

How hard pro-gun legislators would push back against lifting the research and data-gathering restrictions is not clear. Several Republican members of Congress contacted for this story either declined to comment or did not respond. The National Rifle Association would not respond to requests for comment, but NRA officials in the past have blasted federally funded gun research as poorly done and biased in favor of greater gun control.

Chris Crawford, a spokesman for Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), incoming chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, said it is too early to say what would be included in any appropriations bill but that Kingston believes “that gun control can and should be part of the discussion and that it must also include mental health, the impact of the media and a whole host of factors which could have played a role. We expect those issues that fall within the subcommittee’s jurisdiction to be discussed at our hearings in the coming months.”

The fight over the research dates back to 1996, when, after an NRA campaign against CDC gun-related activities, the House cut the agency’s budget by the exact amount spent on firearms-related research the prior year — $2.6 million. The law explicitly forbade the agency from using funds to advocate or promote gun control, according to the mayors group’s report.

While the provision was not strictly a prohibition on gun-related research, the effect was much the same.

The CDC took notice, and over the next 15 years, funding for firearms-related research dropped 95 percent to about $100,000 in 2012, the report states.

James Mercy, a long-standing researcher at the CDC, told the mayors group that “[p]eople within the Division of Violence Prevention and the Injury Center and among CDC leadership broadly understand that being too out-front on firearm injuries increases the threat to our budget — our budget on violence, our budget on injury and the budget of the CDC more broadly.”

And in 2011, at the bidding of then-Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), the NIH, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and other Department of Health and Human Services agencies were saddled with a restriction similar to that placed on the CDC in the 1990s.

The drop-off in funding has led to a lack of current information on a wide range of basic gun issues, Glaze said. The mayors’ report reviewed academic research on guns and found that it had dropped 60 percent from 1996 to 2010, which is “especially striking in light of the exponential growth of academic publications generally, as scholars and journals become more numerous,” the report states.

The absence of independent research has allowed the NRA to fill the void, Glaze said.

“To make sound policy, you need good data. And the gun lobby has been blindfolding policymakers for better than a decade,” Glaze said. “The idea that somehow the public is kept safer by limiting what the public can know about crime guns and about the ways in which guns find their way from dealers into the criminal market is absurd, and I think people are starting to catch on to this.”

The loss of most federal funding for gun-related research over the past 15 years has decimated the field, said Susan Sorenson, a gun policy expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s robbed us of a generation of researchers because there are so few resources to fund the work,” she said.

Art Kellermann, a former CDC researcher who authored firearms reports for the agency before the funding crackdown, said addressing the effective prohibition of relevant research would “correct an historic wrong and could produce very useful information.”

The mayors’ report, to be released in coming weeks, will find a friendly reception among proponents of gun control on the Hill. Some are pledging to address the restrictions in the appropriations process this year — if there is a regular appropriations process and not just a continuing resolution, that is.

“Congress should be doing everything in its power to help further our understanding of why gun violence occurs, not impeding such efforts by inappropriately restricting scientific research,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Labor, Education, Health, and Human Services Subcommittee, which produces the funding bill for health agencies. “I will continue to oppose this rider and will fight any efforts to include it in this year’s Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill.”

The Tiahrt amendments were last changed in the Obama administration’s 2009 budget — the last budget to pass Congress. Provisions that kept the ATF from sharing crime gun tracing information freely, even among law enforcement agencies, were removed. But a number of restrictions remain in effect.

The FBI, for instance, still must destroy approved background checks of gun buyers within 24 hours of running them. The ATF can’t require gun dealers to take inventories of their stock, and journalists and other researchers are not allowed access to vast caches of data the agency collects.

Any measures by the administration to address these issues would have to be approved by Congress, of course. Or they could be addressed in legislation apart from the appropriations process, and at least one Democrat is pursuing that course.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), now running for the Senate seat John Kerry is leaving, said in a statement to POLITICO that it was “outrageous” to throw “blinders on researchers who seek to understand gun-related violence and those who perpetrate it,” and that he is working on legislation to lift the restrictions, “which are based on nothing more than ideology and fly in the face of common sense.”