The words were tucked deep into the sprawling text of President Obama’s signature health-care overhaul. Under the headline “Protection of Second Amendment Gun Rights” was a brief provision restricting the ability of doctors to gather data about their patients’ gun use — a largely overlooked but significant challenge to a movement in American medicine to treat firearms as a matter of public health.

Addressing the statutory bans on medical research into firearms injuries should be higher on the political agenda than banning large capacity magazines or assault rifles. There need to be facts upon which decisions can be made - we cannot tolerate a point of view that collecting factual data is bad.

Ironically, paranoid people who've been led to believe that this data collection is part of some UN conspiracy are going to under report, which means that the data on firearm injuries will look worse than it otherwise would because the control set will be under represented.