Thirdpower put this in the comments section, but it’s so good it bears repeating here:
Follow the money from DU:
the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (impressive title for such a small office, eh?) was created by the anti-gun lobby, and the firearm studies at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center are funded by the same group. The Joyce Foundation is the major force behind the gun prohibitionist movement in this country, and while that foundation has done good things in other areas, whoever is running their gun-related grants is a gun-prohibitionist zealot completely out of touch with the reality of civilian gun ownership in the United States.
http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/janmar95/jan3095/guns.htmlA new center devoted to the study of gun violence was established Jan. 1 at the School of Public Health. The first academic center in the nation devoted exclusively to gun policy, the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research was created through a two-year, $500,000 grant by the Chicago-based Joyce
Foundation.http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc /
Firearms Research Team: With funding from the Joyce foundation, HICRC organized an Internal Research Team for firearms research. We hired a recent graduate from Johns-Hopkins School of Public Health, Lisa Hepburn, Ph.D, as a post-doc. Three other members of this team - Drs. David Hemenway, Matthew Miller and Deborah Azrael - have published over 40 journal articles on firearms since the Center was funded by the CDC in the fall of 1998. With Joyce foundation funding, HICRC sponsored a national random-digit-dial telephone survey of 2700 adults on firearm issues, which was conducted in the spring of 2004.
Their shrillest mouthpiece on the gun issue is probably the Violence Policy Center (the genuises behind the “assault weapon� bait-and-switch and www.banhandgunsnow.org ), but they have also set up a several pro-prohibition study centers to generate press for their agenda to create the appearance of a consensus. It is my understand that they also had out funding to like-minded “independent researchers,� but I don’t have time to track that down at the moment.
In addition to the VPC and the “public health� paper-generating centers, whoever runs the JF’s firearms-related grants also funds the so-called Freedom States Alliance, a network of far-out gun prohibitionist websites including “.50 Caliber Terror�, “gunguys.com�, “gunloophole.org�; they created the so-called “Second Amendment Research Center� to pooh-pooh the idea that the 2ndA means what it says; they support many/most/all of the state-level “Ceasefire� groups; they pay the Consumer Federation of America to advocate for gun regulation; etc. etc. etc.
http://www.joycefdn.org/programs/gunviolence/content/gun-grants.html
