No new gun laws. The National Rifle Association has made its position clear, even amid America's most recent gun debate.
It says enforce the gun laws already on the books.
It's well-known that the organization has actively lobbied to prevent new legislation limiting guns.
But making this happen is more nuanced than just rallying its supporters and lobbyists every time a new law is proposed.
Since the 1990s, the powerful pro-gun NRA has targeted the heart of what most legislation is based on: studies about the effects of gun violence.
Last year, the NRA used its influence in Florida to push through legislation that would punish doctors if they asked patients whether they owned a gun.
And buried inside President Barack Obama's signature health care legislation is a little-known provision that prevents the government and health insurers from asking about gun ownership.
The NRA says it is simply ensuring that taxpayer money isn't being used to promote a political agenda.
"If gun control groups ... (and) individuals want to further their research, we're not saying they shouldn't be able to do it," NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told CNN. "We're just saying they shouldn't be using public funds to do it."
But public health experts say it's all part of an attempt by the NRA-led pro-gun lobby to hamstring lawmakers.
"If a bunch of people do research and generate solid evidence that suggests firearms policy should be reformed and either firearms or people who used them should be regulated in new ways, (if I'm a gun-rights advocate,) I'm not going to like that," said Dr. Garen Wintemute, head of the violence prevention research program at the University of California at Davis.
"So, I'll simply prevent the evidence from being collected in the first place. It's a brilliant strategy, and (the gun lobby) succeeded."
A lightning bolt and a chilling effect
It wasn't a lot of money -- $2.6 million -- but it represented the bulk of the nation's research on firearms safety in the mid-1990s.
"With regards to gun research, it was enormous," said Stephen Teret, the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
In the 1990s, this small portion of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's budget went to a program headed by Dr. Mark Rosenberg that funded two high-profile studies that concluded the risks of having a loaded gun in the home outweigh the benefits.
"That was demonstrated if you counted dead bodies; it was demonstrated if you counted individuals shot but not killed; and tallied up the good guys versus the bad guys," said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, who led the research teams under Rosenberg's National Center for Injury Prevention program.
Kellermann said the studies were not politically motivated but simply a way to give homeowners information to make informed choices.
But the studies created what Teret described as "the lightning rod that started the bolts of lightning from the pro-gun side."
In 1996, it all ended.
Flexing its political muscle on Capitol Hill, the NRA successfully pushed for legislation that effectively ended Rosenberg's program.
To underscore its point, Congress -- in a move led by Jay Dickey, a former gun-rights advocate and Republican legislator from Arkansas -- added this language to the agency's appropriation: "None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control."
At the time, critics in Congress accused the researchers of pursuing an anti-gun agenda and said the CDC's work was redundant.
The provision remains in place today.
The language created what Teret called "a chilling effect" for nearly all gun-related work at the CDC. Though the agency continues to track gun deaths and injuries, it does little work on how to prevent them.
Many years later, the National Institutes of Health funded a similar study that triggered the same lightning-bolt response.
In 2009, the NIH study concluded that a person carrying a gun was nearly 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than someone who is unarmed.
Two years later, Congress added the same restrictive language it had imposed on the CDC to all agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services, including the NIH.
Today, the NRA maintains its position that government research into gun violence is not necessary.
"What works to reduce gun violence is to make sure that criminals are prosecuted and those who have been found to be a danger to themselves or others don't have access to firearms," the NRA's Arulanandam said, "not to carry out more studies."
Unanswered questions
So why are government studies on gun violence necessary?
Rosenberg, who left the CDC in 1999, explained that many of the questions that his group was seeking to answer remain open.
For example, he said, it's not clear whether registering and licensing firearms lowers gun violence; whether allowing people to carry concealed weapons increases
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