Dickey Amendment

Not to be confused with Dickey–Wicker Amendment.

The Dickey Amendment is a provision first inserted as a rider into the 1997 omnibus spending bill of the United States federal government that mandated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control."[1] In the same spending bill, Congress earmarked $2.6 million from the CDC's budget, the exact amount that had previously been allocated to the agency for firearms research the previous year, for traumatic brain injury-related research.[2]

The amendment was lobbied for by the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), and named after its author Jay Dickey, a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from Arkansas.[2] Although the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban it, for about two decades the CDC avoided all research on gun violence for fear it would be financially penalized.[3] Congress clarified the law in 2018 to allow for such research, and the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996.[4][5]

  1. ^ 104th Congress (September 30, 1996). "Public Law 104–208" (PDF). GovInfo. US Government Publishing Office. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 6, 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ a b Jamieson, Christine (February 2013). "Gun violence research: History of the federal funding freeze". Psychological Science Agenda. American Psychological Association. Archived from the original on February 18, 2013.
  3. ^ Fessenden, Marissa (13 July 2015). "Why So Few Scientists Are Studying the Causes of Gun Violence". Smithsonian Magazine. Archived from the original on July 18, 2015. Retrieved 13 March 2016.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Subbaraman, Nidhi (2019-12-17). "United States to fund gun-violence research after 20-year freeze". Nature. 577 (7788): 12. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-03882-w. Archived from the original on December 19, 2019.(subscription required)