Dear Chairman Cochran and Vice Chairwoman Mikulski,

We write to request that the Committee on Appropriations hold a hearing on appropriating funds for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct research into the causes and prevention of gun violence in the United States, and on the annual appropriations rider that some have interpreted as preventing it.

In 1996, Congress included a rider in the annual appropriations bill that prohibited the CDC from lobbying on behalf of gun control. Specifically, the rider provides that none of the funds made available to the CDC may be used “to advocate or promote gun control.” Unfortunately, some have misconstrued this rider not as a ban on supporting legislative efforts to limit access to firearms, but as a ban on supporting scientific research into the causes of gun violence. This rider, which Congress has included in every subsequent annual appropriations bill, has had the unfortunate consequence of blocking all efforts by the federal government to study the causes of gun violence.

Gun violence continues to plague our country. Mass shootings, like those in San Bernardino, Roseburg, Lafayette, Chattanooga, Charleston, Newtown, and Aurora have become incomprehensibly commonplace. Every year, more than 32,000 people in the United States die from gun violence. The troublesome persistence of shooting incidents only underscores the continued need to support peer-reviewed research.

Even the author of the original rider, former Representative Jay Dickey (R-AR), now supports funding CDC gun-violence research and believes that the rider should not stand in the way. As Representative Dickey and Mark Rosenberg, Director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the CDC from 1994 to 1999, recently opined together in the Washington Post : “Both of us now believe strongly that federal funding for research into gun-violence prevention should be dramatically increased. . . . However, it is also important for all to understand that [the rider’s] wording does not constitute an outright ban on federal gun-violence prevention research. It is critical that the appropriation contain enough money to let science thrive and help us determine what works.”

We urge the Committee to hold a hearing on funding CDC gun-violence-prevention research, and to invite Rep. Dickey and Director Rosenberg to testify. We must take steps to fund gun-violence research, because only the United States government is in a position to establish an integrated public health research agenda to understand the causes of gun violence and identify the most effective strategies for prevention.