There’s a disease that kills 30,000 Americans every year, and strikes twice as many others, often resulting in lifelong disabilities.

It’s gun violence, and if it were a virus, we would be doing everything in our power to find the best way to fight it.

An employee of the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner's office removes a body at the scene of a fatal shooting at the University of California, Los Angeles June 1. Associated Press/Nick Ut

But because of intense lobbying from the National Rifle Association and others, we go from funeral to funeral in the dark, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control prevented by law from funding any research into finding ways that might save lives.

It’s time for that to end. The American Medical Association has classified gun violence as a public health crisis, and has pledged to use its lobbying clout to lift Congress’ 20-year ban on researching the gun problem. This move is long overdue, and there is no reasonable argument against it.

Last week’s massacre in Orlando is only the most recent example of why it’s so important to collect this data. It’s unclear whether Orlando was solely an act of aggression against the United States, or an atrocity against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities – or some combination of the two.

49 DEAD

But it is beyond dispute that 49 people were shot to death and 53 others were wounded in a rampage that was facilitated – at least in part – by our liberal gun laws, including the ones that permit easy access to military-style assault weapons designed to kill quickly and big numbers.

The Orlando massacre is just a more extreme example of what has been going on all around us. On average, there are 33 gun homicides a day, 52 gun suicides and two fatal accidents.

But as the bodies pile up, what does the gun lobby offer? Bromides about firearms being neutral tools (“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”) — as if we would be comfortable with 30,000 table saw deaths every year. The peak of absurdity came last week from likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who had the gall to suggest that the problem at the Pulse nightclub last weekend was not one gunman too many, but many gunmen too few, and if we only encouraged people to bring firearms with them when they went out to bars, everybody would be much safer.

We can do better than that, and we owe it to the families of victims to not take their deaths lightly.

There is near consensus on two principles behind current gun control laws that limit access without threatening constitutional rights: There are certain people who shouldn’t have firearms, and there are certain firearms that no one should have.

Public health research should help society do a better job of refining the laws to better support those principles. For instance, current law prohibits gun possession by people who have ever been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, but that reflects old thinking about mental health. Today, even very ill people are likely to be treated on an outpatient basis. A more effective ban might be a temporary prohibition of gun possession for a person in crisis, but determining how to enforce that would take thorough research.

MACHINE GUN BAN

And despite the Second Amendment, most Americans are prevented by law from owning fully automatic machine guns, and the penalties for breaking the law are so onerous that even criminals don’t bother. The same logic could be applied to semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines, which are involved in only a small fraction of homicides but are used in about half of mass killings (those that involve four or more victims).

Or researchers may find that the sheer number of guns scattered around the country, and not their type, could be the reason behind America’s gun violence rate, which is unlike any other developed country’s.

And the research could also show that the gun industry lobbyists have been right all along, and there is nothing that would effectively slow the steady drumbeat of injury and death. But the fact that they have dug in so hard against asking these questions shows that, at least on some level, they suspect that their position won’t withstand the cold hard facts.

There is a disease that is killing and disabling tens of thousands of Americans every year. It’s time that we have the doctors take a look.

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