January 15, 1999
The Honorable Dianne Feinstein
United States Senate
Washington D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Feinstein:
The undersigned national and California consumer organizations strongly oppose legislation that would place firearms and ammunition under the jurisdiction of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC). The Commission currently has 15,000 household and recreational products within its jurisdiction. Yet its budget for fiscal year 1999 is only $47 million.
CPSC has struggled for almost two decades to recover from massive cuts inflicted on the agency in the 1980s when its budget and staffing levels were slashed by almost one half. Any effort to place guns under CPSC's authority is sure to generate a major attack on the agency from the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun industry.
Such was the case in 1996 when the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Injury Control and Prevention (NCIPC) decided simply to study gun injuries. The NRA and its allies in Congress targeted NCIPC's entire $46 million budget for elimination despite the fact that the vast majority of the money went to injury prevention efforts unrelated to firearms. After a protracted appropriations battle, the NCIPC retained its primary funding but lost the $2.6 million it had earmarked for firearms injury prevention. The NCIPC ceased its activities related to guns.
Our organizations believe that CPSC's budget, regulatory authority, and activities such as data collection would similarly be targeted for destruction by the gun lobby if the agency were perceived as becoming involved in firearms injury prevention. We have worked for years through the appropriations and reauthorization processes to restore CPSC as a viable consumer protection agency. Extending the agency's jurisdiction to include firearms would seriously threaten all of these hard fought gains and consumers might well lose protection from unsafe products.
We respectfully request that any legislation designed to regulate firearms not vest that authority with CPSC. Some of our organizations do support legislation that would grant such authority to the Department of the Treasury, which already oversees licensing of manufacturers and dealers and conducts safety testing of imported handguns. We would be happy to discuss this approach with you.
Thank you for considering our views.
Sincerely,
Mary Ellen Fise
Consumer Federation of America
Saly Greenberg
Consumers Union
Ed Mierzwinski
U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG)
Joan Claybrook
Public Citizen
Kenneth McEldowney
Consumer Action (California)
Jon Golinger
California PIRG
Howard Owens
Consumer Federation of California