"It's All Politics on National Public Radio (NPR: 89.7 and 90.3 FM in our area) aired a very interesting story about data and research related to guns and violence. In that story, we learn how emergency room doctor, Art Kellermann, and others have been discouraged from researching these topics.
According to the NPR story (which you can listen to here) Dr. Kellermann ‘was raised in eastern Tennessee, where his father taught him how to shoot a long gun when he was 10 years old. Kellermann grew up to become an emergency room doctor — and a target for gun-rights groups when he started asking questions like, "If a gun kept in a home was used, who did it shoot, and what were the consequences?"
Kellermann found people turned those guns on themselves and others in the house far more often than on intruders. "In other words, a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense," he says.
Kellermann says the National Rifle Association and other Second Amendment advocates leaned on his then-employer, Emory University, to stop the research. That didn't work. So, he says, "they turned to a softer target, which was the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], the organization that was funding much of this work. And although gun injury prevention research was never more than a tiny percentage of the CDC's research budget, it was enough to bring them under the fire of the NRA."
Lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — held back some money from the CDC and made clear that no federal funds should be used to promote gun control. Many researchers interpreted that message to mean no public health studies about injuries from weapons.’
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