The shameless politicization of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino continues apace this week, this time with the focus shifting to one of the least likely agencies of the federal government imaginable being involved. The Washington Post ran a heartfelt, pleading article after the ambulances had pulled away, noting that on the same day of the ISIS massacre, the evil Republicans in Congress had once again refused to lift the ban on funding for gun violence research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Oh, the irony.

On Wednesday morning, a group of doctors in white coats arrived on Capitol Hill to deliver a petition to Congress. Signed by more than 2,000 physicians around the country, it pleads with lawmakers to lift a restriction that for nearly two decades has essentially blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun violence.

Joined by a handful of Democratic lawmakers, the doctors spoke about the need to view gun violence as a public health epidemic and research ways to solve it – as the country would with any disease causing the deaths of thousands of Americans each year…

“It is disappointing that we have made little progress over the past 20 years in finding solutions to gun violence,” said Nina Agrawal, a New York physician and member of the advocacy group Doctors for America, according to the group’s Twitter feed.

Democrats have been running the same dodge for a while now and it’s an argument that dates back to the 90s. It crops up from time to time and, in fact, had just been shut down yet again in June. In January, the Washington Post was already complaining about the lack of research on the subject at the CDC

The CDC had not touched firearm research since 1996 — when the NRA accused the agency of promoting gun control and Congress threatened to strip the agency’s funding. The CDC’s self-imposed ban dried up a powerful funding source and had a chilling effect felt far beyond the agency: Almost no one wanted to pay for gun violence studies, researchers say. Young academics were warned that joining the field was a good way to kill their careers. And the odd gun study that got published went through linguistic gymnastics to hide any connection to firearms.

Democrats would love to sink more money into this, even though the subject of “study” has absolutely nothing to do with the mission of the CDC. They’re supposed to be studying diseases and working on effective ways to treat them and prevent their transmission. What the Democrats want them to do is come up with some official looking “studies” with doctors’ named on them to use as supporting evidence to bolster gun ban arguments.

Speaking of the “linguistic gymnastics” referenced by the WaPo, how much of a verbal dance on the head of a pin does one have to perform to come up with a definition of disease that includes gun ownership? Are they pretending that they want to study the effects of bullets striking people to determine if that’s bad for your health? I think we could save them a couple of bucks on that one without a lengthy study. Far more likely is the prediction that they simply want to draw a correlation between people dying or being injured and the existence of guns. Also a no brainer, but if that would allow them to classify gun ownership as a “disease” of some sort, I’m guessing they think it would be ammunition (pardon the pun) for an effort to ban private gun ownership.

This proposal is a great way to waste both the time and money of the taxpayers for a blatantly political purpose which would provide zero new information. It’s also completely outside the mission of the CDC. They should stick to what they allegedly know best. If they really want to veer off into unscientific studies, perhaps they could commission an analysis of the mental disease that leads people to join up with radical Muslim groups?