A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association makes it appear the gun control gang is no longer even pretending to have a veneer of respectability.
Entitled “Lifetime and Past-Year Defensive Gun Use,” the telephone survey of 3,000 American adults with “firearm access.” conducted from July to September last year.
The primary contributors are all members of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, part of the Rutgers University School of Health. The lead author, Michael Anestis, is the executive director of the group. The Center also paid for the study so there shouldn’t be any question about the outcome. The center, in turn is funded by New Jersey taxpayers through the Office of the Secretary of Higher Education.
The bias is very clearly present in the sources the group used. Lots of references to David Hemenway, who said it’s not a defensive gun use unless there’s an gunshot injury, and Jens Ludwig and Philip Cook, whose far more limited 1994 survey became the basis of the gun show loophole. While they did mention the 2021 National Gun Survey of 54,000 Americans, which estimated about 1.67 million defensive gun uses annually, the only other source from our side was the mid-90s work by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Not a word about John Lott or the CDC’s estimate of at least 500,000 defensive gun uses each your.
And then there are the questions themselves. You don’t need to be a statistician to see the fix is in.
“Heard gunshots in neighborhood” is another winner. How many of the study participants actually know what a firearm discharge sounds like?
It’s disturbing to think this type of shoddy research is underwritten with state tax dollars but it’s nice to know gun control zealots are unlikely to get any money from the federal government during Trump’s second term.
What is appalling is to see this type of tripe published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A better venue might have been the old MAD magazine. There is no indication the work has been peer-reviewed or faced any real scrutiny yet, there it is, completely unworthy of of the prestige or implied credibility.
To paraphrase Mark Twain (or Benjamin Disraeli): There are lies, damn lies, and gun control statistics.
