From The Hill:

Congress reaches deal to fund gun violence research for first time in decades

Federal agencies will receive $25 million from Congress to study gun violence in a government spending deal reached by House and Senate negotiators — a major win for Democrats who have long pushed for dedicated funding to research the issue, a source told The Hill.

“Democrats have broken the ban on funding for the first time in decades,” the source said.

The deal includes $12.5 million each for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health to study gun violence and ways to prevent it.

Before you start running around like your hair is on fire, remember that the CDC did a study on gun use in 2013 and came to this conclusion:

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.

The data came down on the pro-gun side so the study was buried like it had dirt on the Clintons.

No think about what the data is coming out of Baltimore.  Baltimore is the 4th most dangerous city in America.  The homicide rate in Baltimore has shot up to record highs, on par with the rate in 1993 at the zenith of the crack epidemic.

When we dive into those numbers, we see something that a lot of Conservatives and those of us in the gun community already expected:

2017 homicide data provide insight into Baltimore’s gun wars, police say

About 86 percent of the victims and 85 percent of the 118 suspects identified by police had prior criminal records. And about 46 percent of victims and 44 percent of suspects had previously been arrested for gun crimes, the data show.

Of the guns used, the “overwhelming majority of them are going to be illegally possessed,” said T.J. Smith, a police spokesman.

Smith said the numbers, from the department’s annual homicide analysis, support what the department has been saying: that “the weapon of choice for bad guys in Baltimore is the handgun,” that “repeat violent offenders” are routinely behind the violence, and that often, “today’s victim is yesterday’s suspect, and today’s suspect can be tomorrow’s victim.”

The average homicide victim in Baltimore in 2017 had 11 previous arrests on his record. About 73 percent had drug arrests, and nearly 50 percent had been arrested for a violent crime. About 30 percent were on parole or probation at the time they were killed, and more than 6 percent were on parole or probation for a gun crime.

So overwhelmingly, both the perpetrators and victims of gun violence in Baltimore had previous arrests and convictions for drug and gun crime and were killing each other with illegally obtained guns.

It seems like going soft on drug dealers, reducing sentencing, and “ending mass incarceration” makes for good Progressive talking points, but actually increases the homicide rate.

If this is the data from Baltimore, how much do you want to bet that the data is similar in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and every other blue City where crime is going up?

I really don’t think that the Democrats are going to like it if the CDC comes out and says that the Progressive policies on criminal justice reform are causing the bodies to pile up.  Such a study will probably disappear faster than the girls that could swear that Bill Clinton was at Jeffry Epstein’s rape island parties.

The one thing we need to be concerned about is these studies being conducted by partisan hack “researchers.”

I don’t think we have anything to fear from unbiased studies.  We just have to make sure that the studies are conducted honestly.