Despite what Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have you believe, research matters.
It’s a strongly held MAGA tenet that experts are unreliable and that people should do their own research — you know, like on the best way to treat your child’s cancer — and that, in any case, Trump knows all or, at minimum, better. Much, much better.
Want early access to
Mike’s columns?
Subscribe to get an
exclusive first look at
his columns twice a week.
This won’t surprise you, but I beg to differ. Although faith in institutions of all kinds has rapidly fallen — much of the falling, by the way, preceding Trump’s terms in office — I’m pretty sure most people still understand that there are researchers who might know just a little more about, say, climate change than those who merely call it a hoax because someone said so on Newsmax.
But we have to worry about more than just MAGA words. More important are Trump’s anti-science and anti-research actions.
Like his cuts to the National Institutes of Health (some of them later rescinded). Like his cuts to university research (some of them rescinded if the colleges agreed to pay a bribe). Like his layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which have, according to gun-safety researchers, gutted gun-violence research, along with much other health-related research.
The former director of the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention says the unit lost approximately two-thirds of its employees in the Elon Musk DOGE purge. I mean, I’m guessing that well-established research would show there are maybe better ways to reduce violence than for Trump and AG Pam Bondi to take over D.C.’s Metro police department. It looks like a judge agrees, at least for now.
But, thankfully, there are still U.S. researchers who have so far survived, including those at the Colorado School of Public Health, which recently published a study on how dangerously easy it is for Colorado kids to access guns.
Trump may not want you to know this. He might well call it fake news, if he’s not too busy rolling out the red carpet in Anchorage for his buddy Vladimir Putin. RFK Jr. might not care about the results any more than he cares about what science says about mRNA vaccines.
But if the good news is that we still fund some research in Colorado, that doesn’t mean the recent Colorado School of Public Health study’s news is good. In fact, it’s frighteningly bad, but still very important to know.
According to the study, nearly one-third of Colorado kids say they could get their hands on a loaded gun without an adult’s permission.
It doesn’t get much scarier than that. We know — because of data collected by researchers — that guns are the leading cause of death among young people in the United States, surpassing car accidents. In Colorado, young people 24 or younger die at a significantly higher rate from firearm-related injuries — 940 such deaths from 2020 to 2024 — than from car accidents (818).
Where do kids get loaded guns? A little more than half of those who say they have easy access report they can get them from their home. But a little more than half cite other sources — including extended family members, friends, theft, illegal purchases.
In other words, it’s about more than parents keeping the home safe and certainly more than lectures on the dangers of guns.
We know that gun violence in our cities has been actually falling for the last few years. But you may not know — this data comes from the Biden-era CDC — that gun suicides among young people, particularly those in rural communities, are rising. As a report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions notes (again using CDC statistics), there are 10 times more suicides in rural Wyoming than there are in mostly urban Massachusetts.
It’s important to know many more young (and old) males commit suicide by gun than young females.
And here’s what the Colorado School of Public Health found, using data from the 2023 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, which does on an every-other-year study of children’s health issues:
The groups most likely to access a loaded gun in the home — white kids and those who live in rural areas — are also those more likely to die in a gun-related suicide. Those who say they have access to a gun outside the home — Black, Hispanic and multiracial children — are at the highest risk for gun-related homicide.
This stuff matters. Getting this kind of news in the brief time between mass shootings — which inevitably lead to massive arguments around gun safety laws vs. thoughts and prayers — matters.
I know that hardly anyone believes it’s good for kids to have loaded guns on their own or to be subject to violence, including gun violence but also violence of any kind.
But I don’t know why anyone, of any political strain, wouldn’t want to know as much as the data can tell us so that we know more about solving the problem.
Objective research on difficult-to-solve issues matters. Even when — and maybe especially when — the news is bad.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.