GUN VIOLENCE : Congress Poised To Keep Banning Gun Violence Research The guy behind the ban says agencies should defy Congress and study it anyway.

Sam Stein Senior Politics Editor, The Huffington Post 12/17/15

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of a school shooting in Oregon this fall, it briefly appeared that Congress was willing to reconsider its two-decade ban on the use of taxpayer dollars to research the health impact of gun violence.

JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nearly 100 confiscated illegal firearms rest on a table before a press conference

 on gun trafficking on Oct. 12, 2012 in New York.

There was nothing particularly different about the moment, sad as that may be. The death toll was high, with nine people murdered at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. But school shootings have happened with regularity for years. And even in the wake of worse instances of gun violence, there were no serious efforts to undo the ban that prevents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting gun-related research.

What was different this fall was that gun control advocates prioritized reversing the research ban (perhaps recognizing that their other objectives were futile). Moreover, presidential candidates as ideologically asymmetrical as Hillary Clintonand Ben Carson said it was time to reconsider it. But perhaps most symbolically, the original author of the ban, former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.), called on lawmakers to undo it.

“I have regrets,” he told The Huffington Post in October. Alas, others didn’t.

On 1 a.m. on Wednesday, congressional leaders unveiled the text of a year-end spending bill that will fund the government through 2017. And on page 936 of the document is the very language that Dickey helped craft in 1996 that has remained law ever since: “None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.”