The CDC study into gun violence that the NRA is desperate to keep Americans from ever seeing.

Courtesy of Raw Story:

President Obama has directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence as part of his legislative package on gun control. The CDC hasn’t pursued this kind of research since 1996 when the National Rifle Association lobbied Congress to cut funding for it, arguing that the studies were politicized and being used to promote gun control. We’ve interviewed Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the agency’s gun violence research in the nineties when he was the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. 

Q: So what were you were able to find before funding got cut off? 

One of the critical studies that we supported was looking at the question of whether having a firearm in your home protects you or puts you at increased risk. This was a very important question because people who want to sell more guns say that having a gun in your home is the way to protect your family. 

What the research showed was not only did having a firearm in your home not protect you, but it hugely increased the risk that someone in your family would die from a firearm homicide. It increased the risk almost 300 percent, almost three times as high. 

It also showed that the risk that someone in your home would commit suicide went up. It went up five-fold if you had a gun in the home. These are huge, huge risks, and to just put that in perspective, we look at a risk that someone might get a heart attack or that they might get a certain type of cancer, and if that risk might be 20 percent greater, that may be enough to ban a certain drug or a certain product. 

But in this case, we’re talking about a risk not 20 percent, not 100 percent, not 200 percent, but almost 300 percent or 500 percent. These are huge, huge risks. 

Q: I understand there was also an effort to collect data on gun violence through something called the Firearm Injury Surveillance System. What did that involve? 

We were collecting information to answer the question of who, what, where, when, and how did shootings occur? 

We were finding that most homicides occur between people who know each other, people who are acquaintances or might be doing business together or might be living together. They’re not stranger-on-stranger shootings. They’re not mostly home intrusions. 

We also found that there were a lot of firearm suicides, and in fact most firearm deaths are suicides. There were a lot of young people who were impulsive who were using guns to commit suicide.

Gee no wonder the NRA wants to keep this information quiet, it essentially refutes virtually EVERYTHING the gun lobby tells us is true about guns and whether they make us safer, or less safe.

You I know here's what kind of bothers me about the gun debate. Most of this should be fairly common sense. I mean if you have more guns in the country that clearly increases the possibility of gun violence, yet the NRA argument is that if more people had access to firearms there would be LESS gun violence.

That kind of thinking is illogical to say the least, and insane to give it the title that it deserves.

And furthermore I am damn sick and tired of hearing that old "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" line from these gun nuts. Strictly speaking that may usually be true, but guns give these people so much additional power to cause injury or death, that even a dog can suddenly become a possible assassin, even if only by accident:

Gregory Dale Lanier of Frostproof was riding in his truck on Feb. 23 when the dog knocked his 9mm handgun onto the floor of the truck, causing it to discharge into the man’s leg, a police report indicated. 

This by no means is the ONLY time a man has been shot by his dog either. Not by a long shot. (Pardon the pun.)
 
So perhaps the saying should be more along the lines of "Guns are so effective at killing people, that with them even the family pet can kill people."

How would THAT look on a bumper sticker?