By Carl “Bear” Bussjaeger
I saw this yesterday . . .
Drunk drivers more likely to commit violent gun crimes in California, study finds.
Gun buyers in California convicted of driving under the influence are at greater risk of committing a violent crime or a firearm-related offense, a group of researchers at UC Davis found in a broad study that tracks gun purchasers over the span of a decade.
Well, that sounds bad, right? Maybe we should make a DUI conviction a prohibited person qualifier.
Or maybe we should look closely at the study and see what they really found.
I want to get to the really important stuff, so I’ll summarize this very briefly. Even when they examined the age range most likely to commit violent crimes, they found that honest gun owners are just that: remarkably unlikely to offend.
More, they had to inflate that “committing a violent crime” by counting arrests and charges, not convictions.They specifically did not look for convictions.
The important part, though, isn’t the study’s conclusions. It’s the methodology.
These researchers — including noted anti-gun rights UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program director Garen Wintemute — used Dealer Records of Sales to identify 160,619 lawful gun owners. They then tracked these individuals, including where they lived, for the period of 2001-2013.
That was 160,619 handgun buyers. It seems likely they got access to all DROS data, so the number is probably a lot higher.
Worse:
Data from DROS suggested that 2001 was a typical year. The sales volume of handguns in 2001 (160,619) was close to the mean volume during 1996 to 2005 (181,877 [range, 126,233-244,569]).
That suggests thee researchers have DROS data for ten years worth of lawful purchasers. Wintemute’s Violence Prevention Research Program could well be tracking millions of California gun owners.
The idea of Wintemute, with his anti-human/civil rights agenda, pushing unconstitutional laws by identifying and tracking lawful gun owners is not happy-making.
Carl “Bear” Bussjaeger is a longtime RKBA activist, writer, veteran, and former peace officer. He’s a contributor to The Zelman Partisans blog.
This letter was originally published at Random Acts of Gibberish and is reprinted here with permission.