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NRA Blocking Vital Gun Violence Research, Scientists Tell Biden »
* Biden's task force to make recommendations on Tuesday * Congress has slashed gun violence research funding By Peter Henderson SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 10 (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. Source Main page (current trends)