gun safety just as with more research we’ve reduced traffic fatalities
enormously over the last 30 years,’ Obama said in 2016. ‘We do
research when cars, food, medicine, even toys harm people so that
we make them safer. And you know what, research, science, those
are good things. They work.’[43]
Cars have become much safer, but the industry was initially
reluctant to accept suggestions that their vehicles needed
improvements. When Ralph Nader published his 1965 book Unsafe
at Any Speed, which presented evidence of dangerous design flaws,
car companies attempted to smear him. They got private detectives
to track his movements and hired a prostitute to try and seduce him.
[44] Even the book’s publisher, Richard Grossman, was sceptical
about the message. He thought it would be hard to market and
probably wouldn’t sell very well. ‘Even if every word in it is true and
everything about it is as outrageous as he says,’ Grossman later
recalled, ‘do people want to read about that?’[45]
It turned out that they did. Unsafe at Any Speed became a
bestseller and calls to improve road safety grew, leading to seat belts
and eventually features like airbags and antilock brakes. Even so, it
had taken a while for the evidence to accumulate prior to Nader’s
book. In the 1930s, many experts thought it was safer to be thrown
from a car during an accident, rather than be stuck inside.[46] For
decades, manufacturers and politicians weren’t that interested in car
safety research. After the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, that
changed. In 1965, a million miles of car travel came with a 5 per cent
chance of death; by 2014 this had dropped to 1 per cent.
Before he died in 2017, Jay Dickey indicated that his views on gun
research had shifted. He believed the CDC needed to look at gun
violence. ‘We need to turn this over to science and take it away from
politics,’ he told the Washington Post in 2015.[47] In the years
following their 1996 clash, Dickey and Mark Rosenberg had become
friends, taking time to listen and find common ground on the need for
gun research. ‘We won’t know the cause of gun violence until we look
for it,’ they would later write in a joint opinion piece.
Despite constraints on funding, some evidence about gun violence
is available. In the early 1990s, before the Dickey Amendment, CDC-