To make an informed decision, you need information. And that's exactly what everybody involved in America's bitter gun debate doesn't have.

Guns kill more than 33,000 Americans a year, yet the clock stopped on government research into this epidemic two decades ago. As is frequently noted, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has funded no in-depth studies of gun violence, its causes, or proposals for its reduction since 1996. That's when the so-called "Dickey Amendment" — telegraphed, if not explicitly described as, a "ban" on such research — was enacted by Congress.

This angry history dates back to a much publicized study funded by the CDC in 1993 that identified gun ownership as a risk factor for homicides in American homes. Critics, led by the National Rifle Association, characterized the CDC as "anti-gun" and pushed hard for the new rule — a vague and broad mandate ordering the agency to stay away from research that might "advocate or promote gun control."

To hammer the point home, Congress gouged $2.6 million from the CDC's budget the following year. Not at all incidentally, that's the exact amount the agency had previously dedicated to gun-violence research.

The agency got the message: When the $2.6 million was later restored, it was earmarked for an entirely different purpose. CDC gun violence research dwindled to $50,000 a year, dedicated to a program that tracks data on all injuries nationwide, including those attributed to firearms.

Less than a drop in the agency's $7 billion annual budget. A mote. An invisible speck.

Imagine, if you will, that Congress had ordered researchers battling lung cancers to refrain from studying smoking, or even from talking about it. Or to steer clear of auto fatality studies that might highlight a need for better safety standards or changes in driver education.

The result has been a shameful, embarrassing fact vacuum. It's not science that powers public opinion and, ultimately, policy regarding guns. Instead, it's shrill politics and knee-jerk emotion. The science simply does not exist to determine whether proposals from either end of the spectrum would in practice save lives and prevent injuries.

Do more "right to carry" laws for public places give the good guys an edge? Not enough data to say. Should we ban assault rifles, crack down on gun shows? Those are popular "common sense" proposals, but persuasive research to back them up doesn't exist.

There is simply no other means of making a dent in the high rate of gun violence in this country than framing it as an issue of public health. In April 141 medical agencies — including heavy hitters American Medical Association, American Public Health Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics — joined in an urgent call on leading members of Congress to direct the CDC to begin funding research aimed at answering key questions.

Separately, the AMA has called gun violence, in increasingly urgent tones, a "public health crisis."

The answers they want aren't about "gun control." They're about protecting children, reducing suicides, identifying whether strategies already adopted in various states and communities are actually doing any good.

Now 20 years behind the curve, all researchers really know about a major cause of death and disability in our nation is how much they don't know. It's not damage that can be fixed overnight: An entire generation of young researchers, knowing that the grant pool is virtually nonexistent, has steered away from studying gun violence. It is, for want of a better term, career suicide.

You don't have to go much farther to find out how self-defeating all this has been than to ask the man who introduced the original ban: Jay Dickey, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas, now says he wishes he hadn't. After the 2012 theater murders in Aurora, Colo., the retired legislator said publicly that he regrets having led the charge to target the CDC's gun-research efforts.

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Former Republican Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark., originally introduced the effective ban on federal gun research. Today, he has regrets: "I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time," he said last year. (The Associated Press)

"I wish we had started the proper research and kept it going all this time," Dickey told the Huffington Post last year. "I have regrets."

Without scientifically sound research, policy reform is worse than useless: It's a waste of time and money. It's closing our eyes and aiming for the dartboard.

Is preserving our hamstrung ignorance on this issue worth 33,000 lives every year? It shouldn't be. It can't be.

In the experts' own words

"Health epidemics don't end unless we intervene, taking the best science about what does and does not work and using it. It happened with Ebola, it worked for automobile crashes, and it can absolutely reduce gun violence."

"Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearms-related deaths and injuries."

"Gun violence is a public health threat to children, and like any epidemic, it can be prevented with the right interventions."