What the NRA Doesn’t Want You to Know The National Rifle Association (NRA) has blocked federal funding for gun violence prevention research since 1996, preventing us from knowing what works to prevent gun injuries and fatalities. In 1996, alarmed by the potential impact of recent public health research indicating that guns in the home were associated with higher rates of homicide and suicide, the NRA convinced lawmakers to prohibit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from spending any funds to advocate or promote gun control and to cut the agency’s funding by the exact amount that had been provided the previous year to study the prevention of gun injuries and fatalities.1 Although the CDC had not been advocating or promoting gun control, these changes had the effect of reducing by 95 percent the agency’s funding of gun injury prevention research. In 2011, the NRA did the same thing for National Institutes of Health funding. As a result, we now know far less than we need to about what works to prevent the more than 30,000 gun deaths and 70,000 gun injuries that occur every year. In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, President Obama signed an executive order clarifying that the CDC and NIH are not prohibited from studying gun violence and included $10 million in funding to study the prevention of gun injuries and fatalities in his FY2014 budget request. The NRA has actively prevented enforcement of current gun safety laws. While the NRA says they support enforcing gun laws, the truth is the organization has done all it can to make it more difficult for federal agencies and local law enforcement to hold criminal gun dealers and traffickers accountable.2 Working with its allies in Congress, the NRA has succeeded in: • preventing law enforcement from using gun trace data—data linking crime guns to the retailers that first sold them—in some legal proceedings; • prohibiting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from requiring dealers to keep inventories of their stock of weapons; • banning ATF’s electronic storage of gun sales records, thereby preventing efficient analysis of data to find suspicious patterns and identify the sources of crime guns; • limiting the resources and operating flexibility of the ATF; and • banning the disclosure of gun trace data to the public, including researchers. As a result the ATF, which is responsible for ensuring guns are not sold to prohibited buyers, is unable to efficiently and properly enforce gun laws, and local law enforcement entities face unnecessary hurdles when trying to limit crime guns in their jurisdictions. The NRA represents a small minority of gun owners. The NRA claims nearly five million members.3 Based on surveys showing somewhere between 22 4 and 29 5 percent of American adults owning guns, there are an estimated 52 to 68 million gun owners in the country.6 This means that the NRA only represents between 7 and 9 percent of American gun owners. This may explain why the NRA’s positions are often at odds with those of the majority of gun owners. The NRA’s position on universal background checks is out of sync with that of its members. Polling data show that 85 percent of gun owners7 and 74 percent of NRA members support universal background checks,8 a policy position that the NRA vehemently opposes and worked hard to defeat in the Senate in April 2013. The NRA recently claimed that its members did not support background checks.9 However, the evidence the NRA used to support this claim in fact referred to completely different policies: the establishment of a national gun database, federal gun registration, and a ban on the sale of guns between private citizens.10
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Children’s Defense Fund