In a very small victory for decent governance, Democrats announced Monday that federal research on gun violence will not just be permitted, but funded: $12.5 million each is to be allocated to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and to the National Institutes of Health.

The funding is tucked into the wide-ranging spending bill that must be passed by this Friday to keep the federal government open, meaning the “deal” is presumably that the Senate will be going along with this. And it is truly a token effort: $25 million is not much, in the books of federal research. That $25 million lifts the longstanding ban on any federally sponsored research into the causes of and solutions to gun violence. That was a ban against gun “control” research, instituted by NRA-toadying conservatives during the Clinton administration that had the (intended) effect of banning any federal research that might at some point be used as evidence for the effectiveness of having slightly fewer guns swimming through our public spaces.