Using an AIDS-activism slogan to protest gun violence
The NRA and the Dickey Amendment killed any attempt by the CDC to research gun violence. Sound like another historical epidemic?
Today, at one of the thousands of student walkouts across the U.S. to advocate for gun policy change, a protester carried a sign that bore a striking resemblance to a now iconic patch worn by artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz in 1988. It read, “If I die of AIDS — forget burial — just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.” The words were meant both as a plea and a brazen indictment of the federal government’s inaction in the face of the disease’s rising death toll.
There is a photograph of Wojnarowicz’s patch that is well-known among AIDS activists. Judging by today’s walkouts, that photograph has inspired other forms of activism. One protester, whose photo appears in a Twitter feed with the handle @Anna_Snackz, was wearing a sign that read, “If I die in a school shooting drop my body on the steps of the CDC.”
Why the CDC?
Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could — and, many believe, should — research gun violence as a public health issue. The institution is uniquely equipped to serve as a vital resource in the effort to better understand and combat the scourge of firearms-related injuries and deaths in the U.S. But for more than 20 years, the agency has been hamstrung by an amendment that effectively keeps it from treating gun violence as a problem at all.
That amendment, written by former Arkansas congressman Jay Dickey, came about in large part because of the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association, which believed it had detected anti-gun bias in previous CDC-funded studies. The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996, ordered the CDC never to fund research that could be construed as advocacy for gun control.
Congress went even further to demonstrate to the CDC just how serious it was about redirecting funding once used for gun research. It took the exact same amount it had allocated to gun-violence research ($2.6 million) and specifically earmarked it for a different public health issue: traumatic brain injury.
The American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association now consider gun violence a public health problem. But because of the Dickey Amendment, those who wish to study the issue cannot rely on a federal funding source and must seek money elsewhere, typically from private foundations. After the Sandy Hook shooting, in 2012, President Obama signed an executive order commanding the National Institutes of Health to take up the study of gun violence, but that program never got off the ground.
In practice, the Dickey Amendment is the reason why, despite some of the highest gun violence rates in the world, the United States has little data on the problem. Unlike many other countries, the U.S. remains reluctant to grapple with the issue in the context of public health — the same lens through which we view issues like addiction, suicide, and car crashes.
As for Jay Dickey, he later expressed regret at having stalled gun research so significantly. In a 2015 interview with NPR, he said he doesn’t know exactly how guns could be regulated so that fewer people die, but that in “all this time that we have had, we would’ve found a solution, in my opinion. And I think it’s a shame that we haven’t.”
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