Pelosi stops short of threatening shutdown over ban on federally funded gun research

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is pressing for next year's budget to include an end to the ban on government-funded research on gun violence.

At a news conference Thursday morning, Democratic lawmakers joined family members of people who have died from gun violence to call on Congress to lift a ban on federal gun research.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Democrats could “not have a bill leave the station that still has that ban in it.”

A Republican-led Congress in 1996 chose to defund federal gun research as a result of a study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found having a gun in the home increased “the risk of homicide and suicide threefold.”

The former Republican congressman who wrote the law that banned the funding now says that was a mistake.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wondered what the outcry would be if the CDC couldn't collect data on diseases such as Ebola.

“We have in this nation truly an epidemic of gun death and gun disease that is taking lives, 90 of them every day, and should be treated as a public health crisis,” he said.

Pelosi said lifting the ban is a “priority” for Democrats. She stopped short of saying that Democrats would oppose the year-end government spending bill if the ban is again renewed.

The mass shooting in San Bernardino Calif., has reignited a debate that's been ongoing for the past several decades—whether the gun-related deaths of about 32,000 Americans a year should be considered a public health issue.

Some say viewing gun violence through that prism is a way to find solutions. But others, even those who support such approaches, doubt it would lead to any meaningful action.

And neither side has the data to back up their claims. That's because for the last two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been prevented from funding gun violence research.

The American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association and other stakeholders in the healthcare community contend that evidence-based data leads to solutions, much like CDC research has led to lower smoking rates and road safety features.

For years, public health leaders, including Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of APHA, have pushed a public health approach to gun violence.

But the more than 1,000 mass shootings that have taken place in the U.S. since the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six adults were killed, have had no impact on the ban on research funding.

After Sandy Hook, President Barack Obama issued an executive order directing the CDC to “research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” But subsequent efforts to introduce bills that would fund that research were defeated in Congress.

In June, a House appropriations committee rejected a proposed measure to lift the CDC funding ban.

In November, dozens of Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to two senior appropriators noting that the federal government dedicates “$240 million a year on traffic safety research, more than $233 million a year on food safety, and $331 million a year on the effects of tobacco, but almost nothing on firearms that kill 33,000 Americans annually.”

Just hours before the San Bernardino shooting, Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.,), chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, joined dozens of physician organizations on the Hill to ask Congress to allow for research.

“It's hard to argue against the CDC being able to conduct scientific research on ways to save lives,” said Thompson spokesman Austin Vevurka. “The bill just has to get to the floor.”

Vevurka said he was confident that a bill for research would pass if House leadership allowed for a vote, but any move toward that end seems unlikely.

Opponents of CDC-funded research on gun violence say such efforts go beyond the agency's role, and public health in general, to address issues that are criminal and sociological problems.

“If the public is allowed to know exactly why Congress defunded the CDC's gun research, (the public) will continue to prevent the CDC from using tax money to advance gun control advocacy,” said Dr. Timothy Wheeler, director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership.

Wheeler said research on gun violence tends to favor gun control advocates and often ignores the rights of non-violent gun owners or the benefits that come with gun ownership, such as for protection from crime.

“Researchers test hypotheses, and a researcher will say here's my hypothesis and then conduct research to see whether or not the hypothesis is supported or disproved,” said Dr. Frederick Rivara, professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Washington.

Rivara was one of the authors of the 1993 NEJM study associating gun ownership with increased likelihood of gun violence. “I think the people who are gun advocates don't want the question to be asked.”

It remains to be seen whether this latest tragedy will prompt lawmakers to allow the CDC to fund research.

But some say it's laws created in Congress, not data compiled and analyzed by the CDC, that will lead to constructive policies.

“It's a moral blunder of the first order,” said Art Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center, regarding a ban on CDC funding gun violence research. “That said, would people change their policies? I don't think so.”

Shannon Muchmore contributed to this report.