If you have ever wondered why our country has so much difficulty understanding and addressing gun violence, you should know more about the Dickey Amendment of 1996. The ’90s was an era of violence and growing numbers of homicides, not unlike what we live through today. Still, despite the bloodshed, the US Congress saw fit to allow the passing of The Dickey Amendment Rider to the Omnibus Annual Appropriations Spending Bill in 1996. The amendment was named after Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas who was the self-proclaimed Congressional point person for the NRA.
As a result of passing the Dickey Amendment, federal funding was divested from gun violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Health for over twenty-five years and prohibits using federal funds to advocate or promote gun control. If not for this bill, funding might have brought forth the kind of progress that we have seen with other public health issues, including COVID-19.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a federal agency whose goal is to serve the public interest in public health and safety matters. Many of us became familiar with the CDC and the idea of public health epidemics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our nation looks to the CDC to inform and guide us in public health matters. Gun Violence is a public health epidemic and falls under the guise of the CDC. To conduct the necessary research, the CDC requires a level of funding and political independence that it has not had. In the 1990s, activists rallied for recognition of gun violence as a public health epidemic, and the NRA responded by motivating their self-proclaimed “congressional point person” Jay Dickey to introduce a rider on a massive appropriations bill. Perhaps no one read it or thought they had to allow it to pass, but by doing so, Congress held back funding that could have fueled many advances against gun violence and saved lives. The NRA left the table proud of their achievement because they want guns in our society at any cost.
In 2018, Anti-gun violence activists and democratic legislators won a significant victory when bipartisan negotiators reached an agreement to fund research on gun violence. However, the Dickey Amendment remained valid. The deal allowed the funding of $25 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to study gun violence as long as gun control is not promoted.
Past research has clearly shown that having guns leads to more homicide, suicides, and accidental deaths; however, according to this agreement, even if the CDC discovered undeniable evidence, it could not use that information to advocate for gun control.
Because the CDC was funded to research gun violence, we became the experiment. The research has been a long list of mass shootings, school shootings, and widespread urban gun violence. With the compromise of 2018, the amendment does not prohibit federal funding for research on the causes of gun violence anymore. Still, it continues to have a devastating effect as a law prohibiting the CDC from doing its job and advising and protecting the public.
