As Jon Stewart notes, below, the new executive order that most riled up the gun nuts was one that permits the Centers for Disease Control to:
Conduct research on the causes and prevention of gun violence, including links between video games, media images, and violence….
Better understand how and when firearms are used in violent death
You see, thanks to the gun nuts at the NRA, and their Republican (and blue dog) puppets in Congress, the CDC has not been permitted to research any of this for 17 years now. That’s why we need an executive order to do it. NBC via Slate:
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the CDC conducted original, peer-reviewed research into gun violence, including questions such as whether people who had guns in their homes gained protection from the weapons. (The answer, researchers found, was no. Homes with guns had a nearly three times greater risk of homicide and a nearly five times greater risk of suicide than those without, according to a 1993 study in the New England Journal of Medicine.)
But in 1996, the NRA, with the help of Congressional leaders, moved to suppress such information and to block future federal research into gun violence, [Dr. Mark Rosenberg, president of the Task Force for Global Health and director of the CDC's Center for Injury Prevention and Control from 1994 to 1999] said.
Yes, the NRA, which now claims that video games and movies are the cause of gun violence (even though the NRA is a big fan of glorifying violence in movies, and has its own violent video game), has banned the CDC from investigating, for nearly two decades, the linkage between video games and movies and gun violence.
There’s a tyrant in this debate, all right.
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