Protesters hold signs aloft as they attend the March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control in Washington, D.C., last month. Cliff Owen/AP hide caption
Protesters hold signs aloft as they attend the March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control in Washington, D.C., last month.
Cliff Owen/APThe growing momentum for tighter gun control following the deadly shooting in Parkland, Fla., is highlighting the National Rifle Association's history of aggressively confronting challenges to what it regards as Second Amendment rights.
Federal limits on both research into gun violence and the release of data about guns used in crimes are powerful reminders of the gun lobbying group's advantages over gun control activists. For decades, the NRA pushed legislation designed to stifle the study and spread of information about the causes of gun violence.
Last month, Congress passed a spending bill that included language[1] giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the authority to resume gun-related studies, but some researchers are skeptical anything will change without funding. The Democrats wrote that part of the bill in order to reverse the Dickey Amendment of 1996, which many believe virtually halted all research on gun violence.
The legislation didn't explicitly ban gun research, but funding cuts reduced it by 90 percent, according to Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The NRA was motivated to support the amendment following a landmark 1993 study[2] that concluded having a gun in the home was more dangerous than not having one.
"The NRA told everybody, 'You either can do research, or you can keep your guns. But if you let the research go forward, you will all lose all of your guns,' " Rosenberg tells[3] Here & Now's Robin Young.
Instead of completely shutting down the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Rosenberg says Congress presented the Dickey Amendment as a compromise. It eventually cut the center's budget[4] by $2.5 million, and Rosenberg was fired in 1999.
Jay Dickey, the Republican congressman from Arkansas who spearheaded the legislation, later told NPR in 2015[5] that he regretted his role in pushing through the provision.
"It wasn't necessary that all research stop," Dickey said. "It just couldn't be the collection of data so that
