Fund robust research into U.S. gun violence

You wouldn't think a trip to a grocery store to buy strawberries could be a life-changing event. But this is America, where gun violence is an epidemic.

Sarah Moonshadow and her son were leaving King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colo., on Monday when they heard gunshots. She told the Denver Post that she instructed her son to duck and then "we just ran."

As police converged on the store, Moonshadow and her son saw a body in the parking lot. "I knew we couldn't do anything for the guy," she said. "We had to go."

Ten people were killed in the shooting spree, including a Boulder police officer, and a 21-year-old from the Denver suburb of Arvada was arrested and charged. His motive, authorities said Tuesday, was not immediately clear. The Colorado mayhem followed last week's shootings that left eight people dead at three Atlanta-area massage businesses. Again, the shooter's motivations there remain under investigation.

What is disturbingly clear is that the Colorado shooting is the nation's seventh mass killing — defined as four or more people killed in one incident, not including the shooter — in 2021, according to the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

So what now? The victims will be mourned. The police officer will be honored for his courage. Democrats in Congress will demand action, while Republicans will push back. We've watched this all play out before, and yet the bloodshed continues.

If only our current leaders would follow the example of Mark Rosenberg and the late U.S. Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark. — two men on opposing sides of the gun debate who eventually teamed up to pursue a common goal: public safety. Dickey was well known for the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using federal funds intended for injury prevention to advocate for gun control.

Yet he forged an unlikely friendship with Rosenberg, president emeritus of the Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta whose 20-year career at the CDC included leading the agency's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and serving as assistant surgeon general.

What the two men realized, Rosenberg told an editorial writer, is that "there are ways that you can keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them while you are protecting the rights of gun owners and reducing gun violence."

And in that spirit, in 2018 Congress passed clarifying language that retained the Dickey Amendment but said the CDC could resume research on gun violence as long as it wasn't lobbying for gun control — a key step that led to $25 million in new funding, split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, in 2020 and 2021.

Rosenberg said clarifying the amendment, rather than repealing it, was key to building bipartisan support. The $50 million in federal funding is a start, he added, but it's a piddling amount compared with what the U.S. has spent on lifesaving research into issues such as car safety and heart disease.

The long drought in federal funding for gun violence research had left the nation looking for answers without adequate data. Rosenberg wants to see more research into four key areas: defining the scope of gun violence, analyzing the causes, identifying strategies to combat it and determining how to implement them.

House budget requests are due by the end of April. With the victims of the Atlanta and Boulder shootings freshly in mind, Congress should support additional funding for research that can save lives without threatening Second Amendment rights.