Peer Review

[TPaine7]

4. LOL! You need the rest of the story. Something else happened in the mid 90s...

I had to purchase this article years ago, so I cannot post a link. If I could, you'd probably have to pay for it.

Sick People With Guns
The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Washington, D.C. Author: William Raspberry Date: Oct 19, 1994 Start Page: a.23 Section: OP/ED Text Word Count: 703


My first thought was to recall Abraham Maslow's aphorism: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails." Now I'm beginning to wonder if Mark Rosenberg's notion isn't worth a second thought.

Rosenberg's weird-sounding (at first) idea is that the way to combat criminal violence is to treat it the way we treat infectious diseases: as a public health problem amenable to causal research, therapy and prevention.

Well, of course. Rosenberg is director of the National Center for Injury Prevention, a division of the National Centers for Disease Control, and the infectious-disease approach may be the only tool he has.

...

"We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol - cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly - and banned." Rosenberg's thought is that if we could transform public attitudes toward guns the way we have transformed public attitudes toward cigarettes, we'd go a long way toward curbing our national epidemic of violence.

Rosenberg announced an unscientific war on gun rights. (In science, the data drives the conclusion; Rosenberg started out knowing the answer and wanting to use "science" to support it.)

After announcing his intent to use the CDC as a propaganda vehicle to treat guns like cigarettes—"dirty, deadly - and banned"—he was shocked and appalled that the NRA choked off his premeditated fraud.

Thanks to the gun lobby's obstruction, questions like whether more guns actually make communities safer, whether the ready availability of high-capacity magazines increases the number of gun-related deaths, or whether more rigorous background checks of gun buyers make a difference, remain maddeningly unanswered.

No, Rosenberg already knew the answers to these and similar questions. He already knew the solution and had a strategy to implement his solution. All he needed was "scientific" cover at taxpayer expense.

The NRA denied him that cover. This has nothing to do with legitimate science.