Despite the hue and cry from Gun Control Advocates, a new study finds no link between the surge in firearm sales during the pandemic and non-domestic gun violence.
https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-021-00339-5
Further, the study points out that a potential link between excess purchases and domestic firearm violence is dependent on how the numeric modeling is constructed. Translated for those who don’t write research papers, that means they can’t really say either way because the model relies on some speculation to set its parameters.
This is pretty embarrassing for groups like Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, and the Giffords group – for whom once-nominated ATF director David Chipman is a paid officer. What’s particularly interesting is that the paper seems to be swallowing its own pride since it starts off with some classic gun control propaganda:
Firearm violence is among America’s leading causes of death and disability (Wintemute, 2015) and has profound adverse social, psychological, and economic effects (Ranney et al., 2019). A large body of research has established an association between firearm access and risk of interpersonal and self-directed firearm violence at the population (Miller et al., 2002), household (Kellermann et al., 1993; Kellermann et al., 1992), and individual (Wintemute et al., 1999; Studdert et al., 2020) levels.
Julia P. Schleimer et al.
Once the flag-waving is done, the paper reluctantly admits that the relationship between violence and firearms access is not direct, nor simple. That undermines gun control who want to keep focus on availability of firearms as a bogeymonster. And by availability, they want you to assume retail sales and private transfers between law-abiding citizens, rather than illicit transfers among criminals who intentionally and with forethought break laws that we can’t reasonably enforce.
What we’re seeing is the struggle between academic integrity and political sophistry, and this time integrity won out – but just barely. I’ll go ahead state plainly that in my opinion most gun control researchers are prevaricators of the highest order. While they don’t outright lie, people like Wintemute, Donohue, and Kellerman indeed manipulate their work to drive certain conclusions among those who aren’t literate in the format, structure, and language of research or statistics. Take that into consideration when looking at Wintemute’s paper above and muse at the pain it must have caused him.
Truly Unpopular 