Embracing ignorance as a primary value
I have never been able to understand the willful ignorance of those in the Tea Party and their allies: being completely ignorant about some topic (on which they take impassioned stands, BTW) and then REFUSING to learn about it.
One explanation is, of course, a kind of specific insanity: the desire to cling to ideas whether they are factual or false, without much caring about the different.
Sometimes it goes further: the willfully ignorant want to make sure that other people also remain ignorant. I see this a lot on the Right, where statements KNOWN to be false are repeated anyway.
And here’s a good example, reported in the NY Times by Michael Luo:
In the wake of the shootings in Tucson, the familiar questions inevitably resurfaced: Are communities where more people carry guns safer or less safe? Does the availability of high-capacity magazines increase deaths? Do more rigorous background checks make a difference?
The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done. And there’s a reason for that. Both scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the National Rife Association has all but choked off funds for such work.
“We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” said Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was for about a decade the leading source of financing for firearms research.
Chris Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said the group had not tried to squelch genuine scientific inquiries, just politically slanted ones. “Our concern is not with legitimate medical science,” he said. “Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.”
The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, according to researchers.
The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying guns as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.
Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the C.D.C. budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before…
