U.S. quietly begins to study gun safety

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By Jim McElhatton

More than a decade after Congress cut funding for firearms research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), another federal health agency has been spending millions of dollars to study such topics as whether teenagers who carry firearms run a different risk of getting shot compared with suffering other sorts of injuries.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also has been financing research to investigate whether having many liquor stores in a neighborhood puts people at greater risk of getting shot.

Such studies are coming under sharp scrutiny by Republican lawmakers who question whether the money could be better spent on biomedical research at a time of increasing competition for NIH funding. They're also leery of NIH research relating to firearms in general, recalling how 13 years ago the House voted to cut CDC funding when critics complained that the agency was trying to win public support for gun control.

"It's almost as if someone's been looking for a way to get this study done ever since the Centers for Disease Control was banned from doing it 10 years ago," Rep. Joe L. Barton, Texas Republican, said of one of the NIH studies. "But it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then."

The NIH, which administers more than $30 billion in taxpayer funds for medical research, defended the grants.

"Gun related violence is a public health problem - it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH," Don Ralbovsky, NIH spokesman, wrote in an e-mail responding to questions about the grants.

"These particular grants do not address gun control; rather they deal with the surrounding web of circumstances involved in many violent crimes, especially how alcohol policy may reduce the public health burden from gun-related injury and death," he said.

Mr. Barton and Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the ranking member on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, respectively, first questioned the NIH about the gun-related grants in a letter Friday to NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.

The letter sought information about grants for current projects and for others starting as far back as 2002, totaling nearly $5 million. The lawmakers called the study of criminal behavior "a laudable endeavor which consistently benefits the American people, often in ways that people do not see."

"And yet we have trouble understanding the administration's desire to spend, for example, $642,561 in taxpayer funds to learn how inner-city teenagers whose friends, acquaintances and peers carry firearms and drink alcohol on street corners could show up in emergency rooms with gunshot wounds.