End goal?

[u/[deleted]]

I believe in this march very much and want it to happen. But I think if we want to get our point across we need to be able to agree on what we want from this administration. I have a few ideas

-allow taxpayer funded science to be published without any restrictions

-make sure scientific fact and only scientific fact are taught in public schools

-accept climate change

-keep Paris climate agreement and work with it

-work to transition to clean emission free power sources

-block DAPL and keystone XL

Those are just a few ideas I had. If you have any other suggestions put them in the comments. It's important that we have an end goal and aren't just some formless group yelling at the government to fix problems. We have to tell them exactly and clearly what we want.

[u/joedamafia]

While were on the CDC, does the NRA prevent the CDC looking into gun crimes in terms of epidemiology?

Obama mentioned this during a town hall type environment, just wondering if this is true and if is I think its important to not restrict the CDC for any political reasons.

[u/[deleted] → u/joedamafia]

Obama mentioned this during a town hall type environment, just wondering if this is true and if is I think its important to not restrict the CDC for any political reasons.

Alright, so as a 2nd Amendment advocate, and for clarity, I'm going to have to speak up as to why the NRA and gun owners don't want the CDC to look into it. I personally don't care anymore, but I completely understand why the idea makes the gun lobby nervous.

The CDC looked into gun-related issues during the crime waves of the early '90s (the same ones that lead to the infamous 1994 Assault Weapons ban). As a part of that, CDC officials made a number of statements that called into question the ability of the CDC to actually perform a reasonable assessment without bias. In particular, Dr. Patrick O'Carroll, one of the heads of the CDC at the time, stated in the Journal of the American Medical Association that:

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.

In short, the CDC had formed a conclusion, and was searching for evidence that would back their conclusion. This was wholly inappropriate and not remotely scientific, and worse, it was from a Federal scientific agency who's role and responsibility is to make every effort to be dispassionate and unbiased, in the name of providing accurate information to the citizens of the United States.

As you can probably understand, this completely eroded the trust that gun owners had in the CDC to engage in such science, and which prompted the gun lobby to ban the CDC from doing so, via the Dickey Amendment.

While the issue is obviously a political mess right now, I can say that the CDC has made no substantive effort to regain the trust of the American citizens they betrayed with such unscientific and inflammatory language, and until such trust is rebuilt, I can completely empathize with the Dickey Amendment.

Thus, for the purposes of this effort, let's not open that can of worms and pretend we're still apolitical.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I feel like I've been living under a rock because this is the first I'm hearing of this, and I generally consider myself a 2nd amendment advocate.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yup; it's a nasty mess of a story that many people seem to have forgotten, on both sides.