House Democrats to allocate $50 million for gun violence research

In another sign of newfound lawmaker willingness to buck the now badly wounded National Rifle Association, House Democrats have revealed a new appropriations bill that provides $50 million in funds for studies on preventing gun violence. Of that money, $25 million will go to the Centers for Disease Control and another $25 million to the National Institutes of Health.

Republicans have long insisted that no government funds go to study gun-related violence, in the supposition that medical research examining such violence would work to infringe Americans' Second Amendment right to murder one another if sufficiently provoked. After the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, Congress attached an "explainer" to a 2018 spending bill that clarified that despite the 1996 amendment barring federal research funding the CDC still "has the authority" to research gun violence. That is so long as that research does not use funding to "advocate or promote gun control"—an "explainer" that was itself a vague win, compared to past years. The implied threat from NRA-boosting lawmakers has always been that any gun violence research that considered or found gun availability to be a factor would be a violation of that restriction, amounting to a de facto ban on all such studies.

A move to allocate $50 million specifically to researching means of curbing gun violence would, therefore, be a big deal. That said, and presuming House Democrats are able to push the allocation through the House, it is not clear whether such funding will pass unscathed through a Republican Senate. Sen. Mitch McConnell has made it publicly clear that he has zero interest in allowing any fragments of a Democratic House agenda to become law, and Senate Republicans have remained among the most loyal backers of the NRA's extremist positions. But it will be a fight.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2V8aSkW