Carl N. Brown said:
"Three, the CDC advocates of the germ theory of gun violence (guns = the germ) have already decided it is their crusade to generate research to prove to Congress that the "germ" needs to be eradicated to solve the problem, same as the polio virus was eradicated to prevent polio."
Please support this statement. - RX-79G, 1 Dec 2016 1:37 AM
The Anti-Lobbying Act bars agencies under the executive branch from using federal grant money from Congress to lobby Congress on specific legislation. This is described in CDC Grant Additional Requirement 12 Lobbying Restrictions.
http://www.cdc.gov/grants/additionalrequirements/ar-12.html
"Applicants should be aware that award recipients are prohibited from using CDC/HHS funds to engage in any lobbying activity. "
Then you have the medical crusaders who feel lobbying against guns is different. They were especially vocal in the Clinton Administration.
Examples of the gun-as-germ and eradication advocacy:
Katherine Christoffel, M.D.: "Guns are a virus that must be eradicated.... Get rid of the guns, get rid of the bullets, and you get rid of the deaths." in Janice Somerville, "Gun Control as Immunization," American Medical News, January 3, 1994, p. 9.
Patrick O'Carroll, Acting Section Head of the Division of Injury Control, Centers for Disease Control: "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."
Dr. Mark Rosenberg, CDC's National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, 1994: "We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes.... Now [smoking] is dirty, deadly, and banned."
This meant collecting data with the view of proving an apriori assumption and using it to lobby Congress to act on the assumption. It is taking a public position before starting the research that is not easy to abandon if the data shows different results. It practically guarantees that the research is biased and the data is slanted. This is not the model for scientific method or pure empirical research: gather the data then draw conclusions and recommend course of action. The conclusion was assumed (guns cause violence), the course of action was assumed (eliminate the cause), all they needed was to build the case by researching data to support the assumptions.
This crusading drive led to the need for Additional Requiremnt 13: the Anti-Lobbying Act restrictions of AR-12 were supplemented by CDC Appropriations Act restriction "AR-13: Prohibition on Use of CDC Funds for Certain Gun Control Activities" which states that lobbying for gun control is not an exception to the anti-lobbying act.
This is usually condemned in the media as preventing empirical research on causes of gun violence. It did not prevent empirical research (see the CDC 2003 and NRC 2004 reviews of empirical reseearch on guns, crime and violence). As a restatement of AR12, AR13 prevented using CDC grant money to lobby Congress for gun legislation. It can be read at:
http://www.cdc.gov/grants/additionalrequirements/ar-13.html