Guns were a battleground at the CDC long before this

“We were the canary in the coal mine about how an agency could react to political attacks,” said Mark Rosenberg, the founding director of the CDC’s Injury Center, which studied injuries and gun violence. “It was a failure at the CDC.”

James Mercy, who headed CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, which worked within the Injury Center, said his old unit had perhaps 180 employees when he retired in 2023. About 60% were cut a few months ago, he said.

Mercy said he was “shocked, but not surprised” at Friday’s attack where Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old man from Kennesaw, fired hundreds of rounds at the CDC headquarters and killed a DeKalb County police officer who tried to stop him.

The constant vilification of the CDC and incessant misinformation from anti-vaxxers, coupled with a society “awash in guns” and untreated mental illness make these events bound to occur, Mercy said.

Rosenberg, who was Mercy’s mentor, said: “It didn’t just happen that a mentally unstable man shot 185 bullets at the CDC. We created this condition.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Rosenberg echoed his former colleague in saying several issues created the tragedy.

“You erode science and the truth,” you have “gun violence that is unrestrained,” you have “gutless politicians,” and “people on one side who think the problem is those on the other side.”

“People are taught to hate the opposition,” he said, quickly adding he was not only pointing a finger at the Right.

Some on the Left “think gun owners are evil,” he said.

Rosenberg, a medical doctor by training, worked on smallpox eradication and curbing diarrhea in developing countries before returning to the CDC in 1983. He was asked by the director to study violence. It was not just firearm attacks, he said, but also crimes like child abuse, suicide and rape.

They were to adhere to scientific methods:

— What is the problem? What happened? What was the relationship between the victim and the attacker?

— What was the cause? Domestic violence? Mental illness?

— What might work in trying to prevent this?

— How successful was that course of action?

“The bottom line is to shift from the thought that violence is evil and we can’t do anything about it,” he said, “to see violence as a problem, that you can change things for the better.”

Rosenberg said researchers asked a basic question: Does having a gun in the house make you safer?

It did not.

In fact, it tripled the risk of someone in the home getting shot and quintupled the risk of suicide by gun.

Suicide by gun (27,300 in 2023, or 58% of all gun deaths) in America is far more common than homicide by gun (17,987), according to a study by Johns Hopkins. Mercy said that suicide by firearm is especially bad for white middle-aged guys, the ones who could benefit from such research.

In the 1990s, household gun ownership was shrinking and the NRA — which likes to say, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” — did not like what the CDC was finding. Gun groups argued the CDC was filled with libs who wanted to take their guns.

The data, Rosenberg said, “would not be good for gun business, so they got (U.S. Rep. Jay) Dickey to do their bidding.”

The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1997, cut $2.6 million from the CDC, the exact amount spent on gun research. The law said the CDC could not advocate for gun control. Rosenberg said that chilled some of the research and frightened away some universities from investigating the subject.

Rosenberg, who was fired by CDC leadership in 1999, said he no longer wanted the hassle.

Ironically, Dickey, a conservative evangelical Republican from Arkansas, warmed up to gun research and became good friends with Rosenberg, a liberal Jewish doctor from the Northeast.

Credit: Mark Rosenberg

Credit: Mark Rosenberg

Mercy said the CDC was still able to conduct research but “we didn’t call it firearm data. We put it in a broader context.”

For years, the CDC marched along collecting gun data with one hand tied behind its back.

In 2019, gun researchers caught a break. A deadlocked Congress needed to pass a spending bill and Democrats, who then controlled the House, were able to wangle a bipartisan deal for $25 million in gun research. It was split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump, then in his first term, signed the bill.

Mercy, who headed Violence Prevention at the time, said his department was able to hire many scientists and increase research on guns.

“It was looking good when I left,” he said of his department, which has since been savaged.

He said the herky-jerky world of politics may keep young scientists and researchers from entering that field. And now add to that a deranged gunman.

“Who is going to want to work at the CDC with the threat of political shifts every four year?” he asked.

That’s the goal of this administration.