Oct 3, 2015 4 min read

It was hard for many people to muster much more than a desensitized, resigned shrug late last week after the latest mass shooting in the United States, this one carried out at a community college in Roseburg, Ore.

Ten were left dead and seven were wounded. We’re used to the ritual by now, after Charleston, S.C., Roanoke, Va., Aurora, Colo., Sandy Hook, and on and on – the nonstop cable television coverage, the images of candlelight vigils and shell-shocked friends engulfed by grief, the details about the killer and the murky well of grievances and delusions that drove him – because it usually is a young man – to take the lives of people that, for the most part, he did not know and who did him no harm.

Then, of course, there are the calls that something be done to reduce the ready access to lethal weaponry and the predictable indifference from Capitol Hill and state capitals. Opponents of sensible gun measures will bellow that blaming guns is like blaming spoons for people being overweight, even though spoons, unlike AR-15 rifles, are designed for a purpose other than killing people in formidable quantities.

At a press conference Thursday night, President Obama lamented the fact that there is “a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America. So how can you with a straight face make the argument that more guns will make us safer?”

No doubt many will try.

Another salient point the president made: Congress, which is in thrall to the gun lobby, forbids the federal government to even collect data and study the effect of gun violence on the American public.

This is a ludicrous restriction. Outgoing Speaker of the House John Boehner has argued that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should not be exploring the impact of guns on public health, because “a gun is not a disease.” But neither are alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs, or swimming pools, all of which have come under scrutiny from the CDC.

The CDC has kept its eyes off guns for almost 20 years, after a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and funded by the CDC found that a gun in a home increased the risk of a homicide happening there – a sensible conclusion. However, the National Rifle Association’s handmaidens in Congress cried that the CDC was calling for gun control and threatened to strip the vitally important agency of its funding. Other researchers working outside the CDC have also been reluctant to look at guns and gun violence in America for fear that they will be pilloried and their careers will be irretrievably damaged.

Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behaviorial sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, told The Washington Post, “It’s odd, but if you’re trying to do policy-informed research, you run into the fact that there are elected officials who don’t want to know the answer.”

It’s not just partisans or gun-control activists who would like to see the CDC explore American gun violence. In 2013, more than 100 scientists signed a letter urging that the agency be able to look at how deaths and injuries from firearms can be prevented. Richard Berk, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the signatories of the letter, told The Post that “I see no upside in ignorance.”

There is indeed no upside in ignorance.

Except maybe to the politicians who are in the pocket of the gun lobby and are afraid of what a comprehensive study by the CDC could uncover.