Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke out against gun violence in America, framing it as a threat to public health which falls under her bureaucratic jurisdiction, according to a CNN interview.
Walensky now intends to revive a long-extinct gun-research program that was largely defunded in the 1990s, the National Review reported.
The power-grab, which follows the far-left Biden administration’s aggressive threats to curtail Second Amendment gun rights, is particularly alarming given the CDC’s recent effort to ignore the rule of law in declaring an unconstitutional eviction moratorium.
Walensky emphasized the health threats involved in gun ownership, insinuating that the CDC would play some active role in creating and enacting firearm restrictions.
“Something has to be done about this,” Walensky told CNN. “Now is the time—it’s pedal to the metal time.”
The federal bureaucrat echoed President
Joe Biden‘s language from several months ago.
In April, he claimed that the country was facing “a gun-violence public health epidemic.”
Walensky said she feels the same urgency as Biden to circumvent the Bill of Rights in the name of health.
“I swore to the President and to this country that I would protect your health,” Walensky said. “This is clearly one of those moments, one of those issues that is harming America’s health.”
She then paid lip service to the politics surrounding the political issue, blaming conservatives for slowing federal regulations while declaring the issue nonpartisan.
“My job is to understand and evaluate the problem, to understand the scope of the problem, to understand why this happens and what are the things that can make it better—to research that, to scale that up, to evaluate it and to make sure that we can integrate it into communities,” Walensky said, contrary to the CDC’s
own stated claims about its purpose and mission.
“We have a lot of work to do in every single one of those areas because we haven’t done a lot of work as a nation in almost any of them,” she said.
According to CNN, the CDC has spent over $2 million to fund a
surveillance mechanism that tracks in real time gunshot injuries reported in hospitals.
The bureaucracy is spending another $8 million of taxpayer money to dedicate to research projects which will supposedly aid in the prevention of gun violence.
Former Clinton-era CDC director David Satcher applauded Walensky’s apparently courageous decision to continue extending a web of regulations over the American people.
“This might mean—could well mean—taking some risks, so I salute Dr. Walensky,” Satcher said.
