Wide-ranging layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have cut staff responsible for developing “gun violence” propaganda, and the Second Amendment Foundation says that’s good news.
Second Amendment Foundation founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said, “With these reductions, the government is no longer treating gun ownership as a communicable disease.”
HHS Secretary Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Department of Health and Human Services — which includes the CDC — would eliminate more than 10,000 jobs and close several divisions. In all, the CDC laid off more than 2,400 employees, according to HHS.
“Ever since the CDC inserted itself into the gun rights debate,” Gottlieb said, “the agency has spent millions of dollars to promote the notion that gun-related violence is a public health issue, and they’ve mostly gotten away with it, thanks largely to their allies in the media treating everything they say as gospel.”
But it’s not a “health crisis,” Gottlieb said, it’s a crime problem. He said the antidote is not restricting the rights of law-abiding gun owners, which CDC research invariably seems to suggest, but instead restricting the freedom of violent repeat offenders.
“One complaint we’ve heard is that these cuts have ‘decimated’ staff responsible for so-called ‘gun violence research and prevention,’ but so far all of this research does not appear to have prevented a single violent crime,” Gottlieb said. “Instead, we see declarations that more research is needed, while anti-gunners use CDC data to erode Second Amendment rights. That sounds like a perpetual ‘make work’ effort to keep the public funding flowing while gun owners are essentially treated like plague carriers, or lepers.”
The CDC’s funding for gun-politicization studies was resumed in 2019 after a decades-long freeze instituted because of the agency’s anti-gun-rights tilt.
For more about CDC’s anti-gun history, check out the NRA’s ‘Trust the Science?’ post from 2021.
