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You would be hard-pressed to find a more under-researched, unregulated, yet deadly product in America than guns, and GOP Rep. Tom Cole is pretty sure it's going to stay that way. The Hill writes:
A key GOP lawmaker says it’s “unlikely” that a provision restricting research on gun violence gets removed in next month’s spending bill.
“It's unlikely that we would remove it in this particular legislation simply because this is a $1.2 trillion bill,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the chairman of the Appropriations health subcommittee, told reporters on Tuesday. “It shouldn't be derailed for a single thing.”
Democrats have renewed their calls for repealing the restriction on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gun research, which is included each year in appropriations bills, in the wake of the school shooting in Florida this month.
Even the Republican lawmaker who was originally responsible for creating that provision back in the '90s—former Arkansas Rep. Jay Dickey— has "regrets" about discontinuing that research and says it could be done "without infringing on the rights of gun owners."
But don't expect GOP lawmakers to do anything at all meaningful on guns that defies their precious benefactor, the NRA, despite the latest massacre. Ironically, House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to focus on "system failures" rather than gun reform.
"We’re going to be looking at the system failures that occurred here," Ryan said at the GOP news conference Tuesday.
There's no bigger "system failure" than the GOP's absolute refusal to regulate guns in any way whatsoever. Unfortunately, that's not what Ryan meant.
So until such time as Congress is being run by lawmakers that have some relationship with reality, expect guns to remain completely unresearched by the CDC and totally unregulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Because, ya know, those three deaths that prompted the CPSC to regulate lawn darts back in the ‘80s were clearly a far more compelling public health risk than the tens of thousands of Americans who are either injured or killed by guns every year.