Scientists urge end to limits on gun safety research

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Research restrictions pushed by the National Rifle Association have stopped the United States from finding solutions to firearms violence, more than a hundred scientists from virtually every major U.S. university told Vice President Joe Biden's task force on gun violence in a letter on Thursday.

In the wake of the December school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, and other mass homicides, the group of economists, health researchers, educators, doctors and criminologists said funding should be restored to a range of study areas, from gun safety to tracking illegal guns.

President Barack Obama has asked Biden to head a task force to come up with gun policy proposals, and Biden was to meet with NRA representatives on Thursday. He said the task force will have recommendations ready for the president by Tuesday.

"While mortality rates from almost every major cause of death declined dramatically over the past half century, the homicide rate in America today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1950," the academics wrote in a letter organized by scholars at the University of Chicago Crime Lab research center.

"Politically-motivated constraints" left the nation "muddling through" a problem that costs American society on the order of $100 billion per year, it said.

The federal Centers for Disease Control has cut firearms safety research by 96 percent since the mid-1990s, according to one estimate. Congress, pushed by the gun lobby, in 1996 put restrictions on CDC funding of gun research into the budget. Restrictions on other agencies were added in later years.

The NRA, the main lobbyist for gun rights, has taken credit for the research halt. "These junk science studies and others like them are designed to provide ammunition for the gun control lobby by advancing the false notion that legal gun ownership is a danger to the public health instead of an inalienable right," it said in 2011.

Research into links between teenagers' use of guns and alcohol, and firearm storage practices, were examples the gun rights group cited, arguing that the studies were meant to show gun ownership was a "disease."

The NRA did not respond to a request for comment ahead of the letter's release.

'ANTI-GUN PROPAGANDA'

A political fight over firearms research has waxed and waned for years. Public health researchers began digging into gun violence in the late 1980s as homicides surged. By 1996, the NRA and allies had concluded that the work was producing "anti-gun propaganda."

Congress in 1996 nearly cut the CDC budget by $2.6 million, the amount the agency spent on firearms research at the time, researchers say. The funds were later restored, but a restriction was added to the budget and remains.

"None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control," the budget read.

Similar language was added to the budget in 2011 for the National Institute of Health and other federal health agencies.

Officials have largely pulled the plug on gun research.

A forthcoming study by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's group, estimates that CDC funding for such research was cut to $100,000 a year in 2009-2012 from an average of $2.5 million, in current dollars, in 1992-1996.

Gun related studies as a percentage of total peer-reviewed research dropped 60 percent, the mayors' group estimates.

"Scientific inquiry in this field has been systematically starved, and as a result almost no one does it," said emergency room physician and University of California, Davis, professor Garen Wintemute, who signed the letter. He estimated that there were fewer than a dozen researchers in the country whose primary commitment was to firearm violence prevention.

Separate federal actions have stopped federal law enforcement officials from collecting, keeping and distributing gun ownership data. Wintemute said that made it much more difficult to effectively study gun trafficking.

Without the research, there is no clear evidence of what to do to curb gun-related violence, the scientists said. Gun rights advocates put the matter differently, saying there is no evidence that gun control works.

The letter will be available on the University of Chicago Crime Lab's Web site, http://crimelab.uchicago.edu.

(Reporting By Peter Henderson; Editing by Martin Howell and Vicki Allen)

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SpaceX Sues Expert Who Questioned Safety of Private Falcon 9 Rocket (SPACE.com)

WASHINGTON — Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is suing Herndon, Va.-based Valador Inc. and its vice president, Joe Fragola, for making what SpaceX says were defamatory allegations about the safety and reliability of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

At the heart of the lawsuit is a June 8 email Fragola allegedly sent to NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, Bryan D. O’Connor, saying he was trying to verify a rumor that the Falcon 9’s first stage experienced a significant anomaly during its December launch of the Dragon space capsule. The suit was filed June 14 in Virginia’s Fairfax County Circuit Court.

"I have just heard a rumor, and I am trying now to check its veracity, that the Falcon 9 experienced a double engine failure in the first stage and that the entire stage blew up just after the first stage separated. I also heard that this information was being held from NASA until SpaceX can 'verify' it."

SpaceX denies there were any such problems on the flight, the second of the medium-lift Falcon 9 rocket. [Photos: SpaceX's Falcon 9 Rocket]

"First, there was no ‘double-engine’ failure (nor even a single engine failure)," SpaceX says in its complaint. “As planned, two of the nine first-stage engines shut down automatically ten seconds before the first stage shut down.

"Second, the first stage did not 'blow up' after separation from the second stage and spacecraft. The launch was broadcast by a camera on the Dragon spacecraft, which vividly showed the separation of the first stage — and no explosion occurred. Furthermore, the first stage was, at all times, tracked by ground telemetry including by NASA. No systems observed any "explosion" of the first stage. As an 'expert,' Fragola should have known the notion of the first stage 'blowing up' was abjectly untrue."

O'Connor did not respond to a request for comment. Fragola, reached June 16 at Valador's Rockville Centre, New York, office, declined to comment, saying he had been advised not to talk about the case.

SpaceX also declined to discuss the case. "It’s still in the hands of counsel and we have no comment," SpaceX spokesman Bobby Block said June 17.

Fragola is a safety expert and a core member of the NASA Exploration Systems Architecture Study team that in 2005 picked the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rockets the agency then set out to build under the now-defunct Constellation program. In December 2009, Fragola testified before the House Science and Technology space and aeronautics subcommittee about ensuring safety in human spaceflight.

In its complaint, SpaceX says Fragola sought a consulting contract worth up to $1 million, claiming the company needed his independent analysis of the Falcon 9 "to bolster its reputation with NASA based on what he called an unfair ‘perception’ about SpaceX." [Video: Falcon Heavy - Most Lift Since Saturn 5]

"SpaceX subsequently learned that Fragola — within the scope of his employment at Valador, and using his email account at Valador — has been contacting officials in the United States Government to make disparaging remarks about SpaceX, which have created the very ‘perception’ that he claimed SpaceX needed his help to rectify," SpaceX’s claim states.

SpaceX also says that if anything went wrong during the flight, NASA would have known. "NASA officials were present with SpaceX controllers in the control center during the flight, and thus saw in real time all of the telemetry information SpaceX controllers saw," the complaint states. "SpaceX then provided extensive post-flight debriefings to NASA, including telemetry analysis. If any of the foregoing events claimed by Fragola had occurred, then NASA would have known as soon as SpaceX did."

Asked whether the Falcon 9 experienced any type of first-stage anomaly in its last outing, Block said: "Any observance noted had no impact on this or future mission success."

SpaceX, which holds a $1.6 billion contract to deliver supplies to the International Space Station using Falcon 9 and Dragon, is seeking at least $1 million in damages plus legal fees and is demanding that a jury hear the case.

SpaceX’s attorney in the suit, Douglas Lobel with the Cooley law firm of Reston, Va., did not respond to a request for comment.

This article was provided by Space News, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

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