After a deadly shooting, the debate always, it seems, breaks down like this: One side argues for gun control, and the other argues there is no research proving those measures work. There is, in fact, little research into gun violence at all—especially compared to other causes of death in the United States.

The modern origins of the impasse can be traced to 1996, when Congress passed an amendment to a spending bill that forbade the Centers of Disease Control and Protection from using money to “advocate or promote gun control.”

The National Rifle Association had pushed for the amendment, after public-health researchers produced a spate of studies suggesting that, for example, having a gun in the house increased risk of homicide and suicide. It deemed the research politically motivated. Gun-rights advocates zeroed in on statements like that of Mark Rosenberg, then the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. In response to the early ’90s crime wave, Rosenberg had said in 1994, “We need 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.”

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Image: By https://www.flickr.com/photos/glasgows/ – https://www.flickr.com/photos/glasgows/432945997/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1984182

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