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This is an idea I've been bouncing around today. It's an idea that is unlikely to gain traction in the partisan environment we're in now, but I think you guys might enjoy it as a bit of political theory.
I've been thinking about the gun issue lately, and what to do about it. I admit as a lefty I do have a slight anti-gun bias, but I try to avoid letting it affect my judgement as I feel somewhat uninformed on the topic. I've been having some trouble though, due to some lack of data. Almost all the data I could find came from sources one could easily claim as biased, and what didn't seem that way was often incomplete most of the time. It was genuinely hard to form an opinion on more than just my own bias.
I discovered the source of this recently: as it stands the government essentially prevents grand-scale studies with its limitations on its own studies and its data. I was very bothered by this to say the least, I am very pro-science for law, and the complete crackdown left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The dickey and tiahrt amendments struck me as extremely zero tolerance (I advise ya'll to look those up if you don't know them). The difficulty of getting gun data makes it only worthwhile to advocates most of the time, which makes most of it easily disregarded as biased NRA/anti-gun propaganda for the public, leaving most people in the dark or swayed by a given advocacy group. Yet I also understand the ideas about the privacy of gun sellers, and the idea that the government studies are biased. But I believe that there are bipartisan ways to deal with these issues.
Starting with the CDC. The complaint about the CDC studying gun violence, was that the CDC had a bias towards anti-gun advocacy, and thus the Dickey Amendment was supposed to eliminate that. Congress also proceeded to cut the funding for gun studies and allocate it towards traumatic brain injuries. While I won't get into whether that claim of bias is true, which is a messy ordeal if you look into the details (I tried my best to form a concrete opinion on whether it was true or not and I failed, it's that messy.), It is true that government agencies can be prone to bias. A particularly common bias is that an agency will often not put out studies that harm its future existence or would reduce their funding, like studies that suggest government action in their area of study doesn't help the public or hurts them.
There is a way to avoid this, a method that's used commonly within the government itself, and it's fairly effective. Separation of powers. My proposal is this: Remove the Dickey amendment which effectively ended up banning gun studies from having certain conclusions and lead to a cut in funds for the subject, but have an alternate mandate that the CDC must study all of the key facets to this multifaceted issue, by having sub-groups within its gun research center. Instead of constantly arguing that the CDC is ignoring this or that with some study, there would be different groups for self-defense, enforcing current laws, dangers of gun ownership, gun-wielding guards etc. Probably more broad than those though, if you wanted to keep the groups from being too expensive.
The goal of this being that no topic is ignored, and that no matter the conclusion in the debate the CDC will keep funding in gun research. If they conclude that self-defense plays a key role in reducing deaths, it can advocate programs informing the public on self-defense and keep funding. If they conclude that guns are a bit too unchecked, it can advocate laws that regulate them. I find it unlikely it won't have something to do in the end with this program. In addition, you could have the internal groups review each other's work if you want to take it a bit farther for accuracy. The other goal of this is to avoid bias by producing independent groups without splitting directly on partisan lines that make it nonscientific.
On changing the tiahrt amendment, which prevents federal gun trace data from being used for anything but ongoing criminal investigations, I propose that an anonymized form of the data is made public while the original data is still kept sealed for the moment. While there's debates on how public the overall federal debate should be due to lawsuits on gun sellers being possible with the full data, I want to avoid that part of the debate and focus on promoting the academic research on guns. Essentially, preserve as much of the data as possible without revealing the particular gun sellers, so that academic research can be done with it.
I essentially just want the science to not be restricted by politics, as currently it feels like it very much is. This is the best idea I have to make it happen without risk of future restriction or have it be disregarded as being from a biased source. Even if you're the hardest 2nd amendment supporter, the 2nd amendment doesn't have much to do with private restrictions on guns, and private companies trying to avoid danger for their employees. They might want this data to make the best decision in that area. The freedom for science is bad for only those who are afraid of being wrong. Perhaps with the right data, we can close the book on this issue ey?