First, we must repeal the N.R.A.-backed Dickey Amendment, named for the man who sponsored it, former Representative Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican. It reads: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

As Sam Roberts wrote last year in The Times, the legislation “stripped $2.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the precise amount budgeted for a study of the health effects of shootings.”

This is a ridiculous, disastrous piece of legislation because it chokes off funding for research on this crisis and ways to stem it. We now propose policy prescriptions largely in an information vacuum.

By comparison, The Washington Post sought to provide an estimated cost of Donald Trump’s asinine proposal to arm a fifth of all teachers, and this is what they concluded: “If we assume the cheapest training and the discounted Glock, we’re at $251 million to arm 718,000 teachers. If we instead assume the full-price, more expansive training and the full-price firearm, the tab creeps past $1 billion.” By the way, the Post estimates that this would put 718,000 guns in our schools and could put hundreds of millions into the coffers of gun makers.

Where the hell are our priorities?

Even Dickey came to regret the negative impact of his disastrous amendment. He co-wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post pointing out that:

“Since the legislation passed in 1996, the United States has spent about $240 million a year on traffic safety research, but there has been almost no publicly funded research on firearm injuries. As a consequence, U.S. scientists cannot answer the most basic question: What works to prevent firearm injuries?”