Gun violence is a public health issue that requires good quality, impartial research and solid data in order to develop common sense solutions. And yet, for explicitly political reasons, Republican majorities in Congress have enacted bans on such research because of the possibility that the results may be politically unpalatable to them.
Politics have no place in the pursuit of data of public events, particularly injuries and deaths. We the People have the right to know the full impacts of the presence of firearms on public health and public safety, and it's time for us to take the admittedly tardy and timid step of counting, recording, and sharing data widely for analysis and reasonable action.