they should make it a felony to lie in the text of a bill.
They only pass laws that exempt them from the laws that apply to you and I. "Qualified immunity", "sovereign immunity", etc., etc., etc.
And even if they passed a law that said "a legislator is guilty of a crime if they lie (either via commission or omission) in the text of a bill AT LEAST TEN TIMES... these 10 sponsors would be guilty in a slam dunk verdict.. the jury might not even need to deliberate: "No, your honor, we don't need to go into any back room. GUILTY!" Hey, a guy's gotta have dreams.
Research is not banned. Gun control advocacy by the CDC is banned, not the research.
They know they can lie with impunity... that's what they do.
From my testimony:
Does the Dickey amendment do what the authors claim (
“a provision which prevents the use of federal money for gun violence research and prevention”)? Another blatant lie. All we have to do is 1. read the actual Dickey amendment, and 2. note all the “gun violence” research the CDC has done since the Dickey amendment was enacted. Both of those facts make the claim of the authors of this bill to be “mistaken” at best. Here's the actual quote on the restriction imposed by the Dickey amendment in 1996: the Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1996 federal government omnibus spending bill which mandated that
"none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control”.
NOT "may not be used to research any firearms related events", but only against “advocate or promote gun control”. That's as clear as can be. The authors of this bill are liars, or ignorant.
You might ask, well why would Dickey introduce such a bill? Surely the CDC would only be producing pure research and not using public money to to “advocate or promote gun control”. You'd be wrong:
In a 1994 New York Times piece, titled “New Tactics Urged in Fight Against Crime,” you’ll find Mark Rosenberg” — then
director at the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which oversaw the “gun violence” research — urging America “to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes … It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol — cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly — and
banned.”
It was Congress that did this because of the CDC's strong political stance against guns that was present in their work. This is due in part to, "
[the] official goal of the CDC’s parent agency, the U.S. Public Health Service, had been “…to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership”, starting with a 25% reduction by the turn of the century.”
"
We’re going to systematically build a case that owning firearms causes deaths. We’re doing the most we can do, given the political realities.” -
P.W. O’Carroll, Acting Section Head of Division of Injury Control, CDC, quoted in Marsha F. Goldsmith, “Epidemiologists Aim at New Target: Health Risk of Handgun Proliferation,” Journal of the American Medical Association vol. 261 no. 5, February 3, 1989, pp. 675-76.
[And it goes on...]