Taxpayers’ money should not be used to fund anti-gun research.
A powerful tactic of the public health gun prohibition movement has been to publish research papers in academic journals to lend credibility to their policy recommendations. Such “advocacy research”—not really valid research at all—was often funded through federal grants from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This practice was stopped by Congress in 1997 through a statutory prohibition on the CDC’s use of federal funds to promote gun control. DRGO played an important part in the events leading up to that decisive action.
But the public health gun prohibition movement has not taken to heart the lesson Congress delivered to them in the 1990s. Gun control activists have continued to push to be allowed to reach into the deep pockets of American taxpayers to fund their anti-gun advocacy research. At DRGO we intend to constantly remind the public of how the CDC misused their own federal tax money to try to disarm them, and of how they want to start doing it again.