bigstockphoto_Gunslinger_1177209“I know the truth—don’t bother me with the facts.”

We see this truism play out ever more frequently in our ever more fractured political culture. It’s one of the reasons our elected officials seem to agree on ever less. Reality is so clear, in their view, that they don’t need facts, like, say, new research, to interfere with their preconceived ideas.

We’ve seen this truism at work in the world of raw milk for decades now, most noticeably over the last ten years, as evidence has accumulated out of Europe that raw milk possesses possibly significant health benefits. Several European studies have strongly suggested that children who consume raw milk have lower rates of asthma and allergies than children drinking pasteurized milk.

But our public health establishment absolutely refuses to sanction research into these tantalizing results. Instead, the establishment continues to argue its version of “truth”—that there is no scientific evidence that raw milk offers any health benefits compared to pasteurized milk. American researchers have learned an important lesson: raw milk is off-limits for any serious research funding…unless you want to get black-listed for future research of any kind.

We see this exact same phenomenon playing out in the world of gun violence. The medical and public health communities are increasingly of a mind that our mass-shooting-a-day pace for 2015 (a mass shooting being defined as four or more people being killed or injured in a single shooting episode) is a public health problem. That we need a deeper understanding of what motivates individuals to carry out these massacres, and guidance for what we as a society can do to reduce their incidence.

Research and serious policy-related exploration–it’s a formula we’ve applied to other public health problems we’ve had over the years, like polio and AIDS.

But it turns out there is a prohibition on the books forbidding public health research into gun violence. The 1996 prohibition was enacted by Congress out of a fear that research could suggest such rational approaches as required background checks on people buying assault rifles or mandated personalized locks for firearms.  The prohibition is based on such beliefs as “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and “Our country’s founders didn’t provide any exceptions for our right to bear arms, so neither should we” and “Cities and states with gun control laws on the books still have lots of gun crime—just look at California and Connecticut, sites of two of the worst mass shootings.”

With raw milk, the absence of research means that our regulators continue to work to limit its availability. Last week a Fort Worth dairy farmer was fined $3,000 for selling raw milk.  We have the grotesque situation of a group of highly paid bureaucrats spending eleven years trying to solidify new rules to justify the truth they already know—that raw milk cheese is highly dangerous, even though there not only hasn’t been a single death, but there have only been a handful of illnesses, at most over that period.

With firearms, we have an even more grotesque situation— the absence of research helps determine that there are no limits at all on the availability of firearms. So crazies and terrorists go about their normal business of using children, college students, moviegoers, shoppers, and many others (they don’t discriminate)) for target practice or just to get their jollies. Since the 1996 prohibition on gun violence research, more than half a million Americans have been killed by guns.

The majority of our legislators and regulators repeat the truisms I listed above, without considering the reality that it’s possible to head off at least some of the most dangerous situations, without unduly restricting gun access for law-abiding citizens. Or that others of our basic rights, like freedom of speech, come with some restrictions to protect from excesses—you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater and you can’t defame other individuals just because you detest them, without risk of penalties. Or that any controls on gun access would by their nature work better if they were national rather than regional, since people who shouldn’t have guns couldn’t easily go shopping in another state.

Then there is the biggest claim: If we put limits on our access to firearms, only the criminals will have them. Well, right now, it’s the criminals that have them, and they are having a grand old time shooting up the law-abiding among us. It was three years ago yesterday that a disturbed individual killed 20 little children at a Connecticut school, and even after that atrocity, not a single screening requirement was placed on access to firearms.

Part of the problem is that we don’t know for sure what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to firearms screening, because we won’t allow ourselves the possibility of new ideas and approaches from research. So our elected officials have essentially said to us: “You are fair game for the crazies and terrorists who carry out the mass shootings. If you die, you are dying to uphold our Constitution’s Second Amendment. Yes, we are sanctioning murder of our own citizens, by giving free reign to the mentally disturbed, but we are doing it for the cause of freedom.”

But people are wising up. Increasingly, they recognize that firearms abuse is a public health problem, and they are taking rational steps to protect themselves. Buying guns to give your children to take to school isn’t what many consider a rational step, despite what our elected officials might suggest. But parents are buying their children bulletproof backpacks and clothing, to fortify them at school. Schools are running drills to hide children in the event crazies or terrorists invade and begin shooting. I expect more people to be carrying around non-lethal weapons, like laser scopes and pepper spray.

While such steps don’t necessarily offer a lot of protection, the fact remains, if you’re dealing with a public health danger, you do whatever you can to protect yourself and your family, right? You put helmets on your children (and yourself) when you ride bicycles. You put bug repellent on when you hike in the woods to cut the risk of Lyme disease. You wear a seat belt to reduce your chances of serious injury in a car accident.

Why should it be any different with guns? Especially when your government is refusing to lift a finger to reduce the risks, you are on your own.

So now we know what raw milk and gun violence have in common. Where they differ is that we have a willingness to enforce strict laws against a public health problem that barely exists for raw milk, and a refusal to take the slightest bit of action for a huge public health problem, leading to thousands of deaths each year, that does exist in gun violence.

I know some readers will disagree strongly with what I’ve said here, but it seems that if we’re going to demand research on the benefits of raw dairy, we should at least be consistent and demand research into gun violence. The only risk is we may be bothered by the facts we learn.