WASHINGTON – Congressional Republicans have questioned a study designed to puzzle out why inner city teenagers who drink and carry firearms, and hang out with others who do the same, seem to end up in emergency rooms with gunshot wounds.
U.S. Reps. Joe Barton of Texas, ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Greg Walden of Oregon, ranking member of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, raised the issue in a letter to Dr. Francis Collins, the new director of the National Institutes of Health.
“Dr. Collins, the gathering of abstract knowledge by qualified researchers who study criminal behavior is a laudable endeavor which consistently benefits the American people, often in ways that the public does not see,” the lawmakers wrote. “And yet we have trouble understanding the administration’s desire to spend, for example, $642,561 in taxpayer funds to learn how inner city teenagers whose friends, acquaintances and peers carry firearms and drink alcohol on street corners could show up in emergency rooms with gunshot wounds.
“The day-follows-night quality of this question and its potential answer simply do not seem to justify the expense that would be borne by people who work and pay their taxes,” they wrote.
According to the study proposal, the information to be gained is vital because so “little is known about the epidemiology of assaultive injury from guns and other weapons among adolescents.”
Researchers will find their study subjects among the injured and gun-shot teens who arrive at two inner city hospitals in Philadelphia. “Each case and control subject will be interviewed using portable, computerized mapping technology to create a dynamic graphic that provides a minute-by-minute record of how, when, with whom, and where the subject spent time as he or she walked or otherwise traveled from location to location and from activity to activity on the day of the injury (cases) or 1-4 days earlier designated randomly (controls).” Reliable statistics will be possible to gather because wounded teenagers will trust the academics and cooperate with them as they are undergo treatment.
Then, “logistic regression analyses will investigate whether adolescents who consume alcohol and/or carry firearms, and/or whose daily activities occur in surroundings rich in alcohol and/or firearms, face a differential risk of being shot with a firearm or injured in a non-gun assault,” the study proposal explained.
Said the lawmakers: “There are many biomedical research projects competing for NIH financial support” and “we are concerned that some NIH-sponsored grants may not be appropriate for the NIH’s medical research mission.”
A copy of the letter can be found here.
