CDC Report on gun control confirms laws don’t work, says Citizens Committee.

BELLEVUE, WA—A report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing that there is no conclusive evidence that gun control laws contribute to decreases in violent crime or suicide “proves what we have been saying for years,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) said today.

“For years,” said CCRKBA Executive Director Joe Waldron, “anti-gun groups, often citing the CDC’s earlier biased research, had claimed more gun laws will reduce violent crime and suicide. CDC stopped conducting advocacy research in 1996 by order of Congress. Now, according to more balanced research, the CDC is basically acknowledging that its earlier efforts, and those of extremist gun grabbers, have been all wet.”

Yet the CDC, evidently unhappy with the available research, wants to study the issue more, arguing that there is “insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence.” Waldron rejected that as more partisan politics.

“Because the CDC could not reach yet another anti-gun conclusion,” he said, “they want to study some more, at least until they come up with a report that squared with their long-standing anti-gun agenda. That doesn’t wash. For the first time, CDC has had to acknowledge that gun control doesn’t work.”

The report brought an incredulous comment from Peter Hamm with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence: “It’s hard to study whether gun control laws work in this country because we have so few of them.”

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb offered this blistering response: “Hamm is half-baked. Gun ownership in this country is heavily regulated by a Pandora’s Box of federal, state and local gun laws, many which often conflict with one another to the point that private citizens cannot know whether they are obeying a law while breaking another. The CDC report seems to confirm what we’ve been saying all along. Gun control laws have no impact on criminals, only law-abiding citizens who don’t commit crimes. To suggest we need more laws when the ones already passed as successive panaceas apparently haven’t worked is ludicrous.

“The CDC’s suggestion for additional studies, simply because they don’t like the results of their own research, is like treating a patient with drugs that you know aren’t working, so you give him more of the same drugs,” Gottlieb observed.