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- CDC Director Dr. Walensky wants to aggressively take on gun violence as a public health crisis.
- She's walking a careful line between tackling the issue while trying not to alienate gun owners.
- "I'm not here about gun control. I'm here about preventing gun violence and gun death," she said.
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Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, wants her agency to establish gun violence as an urgent public health crisis. "Now is the time – it's pedal to the metal time," she told CNN in a new interview.
"The scope of the problem is just bigger than we're even hearing about, and when your heart wrenches every day you turn on the news, you're only hearing the tip of the iceberg," Walensky said.
Congress stopped funding the CDC's gun violence research in 1997 under pressure from the National Rifle Association, and the agency's directors in the time since have largely stayed mum on the issue until now.
The funding changed during the Trump administration, when Congress passed spending bills allocating $25 million for the CDC and National Institutes of Health to research gun violence.
But Walensky says she's trying to walk a thin line between sounding the alarm on the issue without alienating gun owners or adding to politicization of the issue.
"Generally, the word gun, for those who are worried about research in this area, is followed by the word control, and that's not what I want to do here," Walensky told CNN. "I'm not here about gun control. I'm here about preventing gun violence and gun death."
Walensky extended an open invitation to gun owners to "come to the table" and educate her and the agency on how they've cultivated gun safety.
"We cannot understand the research of firearm violence, firearm injury, without embracing wholeheartedly, the firearm owning community," she added. "I really do believe that the population of people who wants to own a gun doesn't want people hurt by them. The majority of the population does not want people hurt by them. I want them at the table."
In the spring, there were several high-profile mass shootings, including ones at spas in Atlanta that targeted Asian women, a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis, a private home in South Carolina, and a rail yard in San Jose.
"This is not a conversation about having them or not having them. This is a conversation about how we can make them being here safe," Walensky told CNN. "The research that we intend to do is going to be squarely about making America safe. Making people safe."
While gun violence may have faded from the headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic, they didn't stop happening. The pandemic largely took mass shooting events and all gun violence behind closed doors and onto city streets, instead of spaces like stores and workplaces.
Data from the Gun Violence Archive found that mass shootings, defined as shooting events that kill four or more people, increased from 417 in 2019 to 610 in 2020.
According to the archive, 2020 was the deadliest year for gun violence in two decades, with nearly 20,000 Americans dying of murder, homicide, unintentional, and defensive gun deaths, with an additional 24,000 dying by suicide with a gun.
The CDC's gun violence research efforts include a project to more closely monitor the causes of emergency room visits for gunshot wounds.
President Joe Biden signed a series of executive actions in early April that crack down on unregulated "ghost guns," which can be assembled from a kit and have no serial number, and directed the Department of Justice to produce a report on combatting firearms trafficking.
The US House also passed two bills that would strengthen background checks for firearms, but they have yet to receive a vote in the Senate. Biden's nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), David Chipman, is also still tied up in the Senate.