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By Alex McCourt, Johns Hopkins University

The U.S. midterm elections took place on the backdrop of surging gun violence and in a year scarred by high-profile mass shootings.

And though exit polls indicated that abortion rights and inflation were the top motivating issues for voters, views toward guns also played a significant role. Indeed, a survey by Edison Research found that around 1 in 10 voters listed gun policy as their top concern.

That guns were in the mind of many voters should not be too much of a surprise. In 2020, there were a record number of gun deaths, and data for 2021 shows a continuing increase. Disparities in gun violence widened – in 2020, the firearm homicide rate for young black men was over 20 times greater than the rate for young white men. The midterms were also the first national vote since the tragic mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas; Buffalo, New York; and Highland Park, Illinois.

The midterm elections offered voters the opportunity to affect gun policy in two ways. First, it gave voters the chance to elect local, state and national officials who will have a say in which gun violence strategies are considered and implemented. And second, in two states – Iowa and Oregon – residents voted on gun rights and gun violence initiatives. The mixed results in these initiatives, in particular, reveal much about the state of gun policy in the United States.

State ballot initiatives

In the two states in which guns appeared explicitly on ballots, voters approved measures that moved state gun laws in opposite directions. Iowa passed a constitutional amendment that enshrined a right to bear arms and specified a standard for judicial review of gun laws, while Oregon voters passed an initiative that requires a permit to buy a firearm and bans large capacity ammunition magazines.

Around two-thirds of Iowans voted to add the right to bear arms to the state constitution. This amendment brings Iowa in line with 44 states that have similar provisions.

Iowa’s amendment differs from most by also setting a strict scrutiny standard for evaluating gun restrictions. Under strict scrutiny, a state law will only be upheld by a court if it is narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest. Researchers have not studied how these provisions affect gun violence, but this amendment is part of an overall trend in Iowa toward deregulating guns. The state began allowing the carrying of concealed handguns without a license and repealed its longstanding law requiring a permit to purchase a handgun. Research has found that both of these changes are associated with increases in gun violence.

Meanwhile, Oregon voters narrowly approved an initiative adopting a permit-to-purchase law. Under Oregon Measure 114, all would-be gun buyers will be required to first acquire a permit from local law enforcement. To acquire a permit, applicants will need to be fingerprinted, pass a background check and undergo safety training.

Research has consistently shown that laws requiring a permit to purchase a gun are associated with reductions in homicide, suicide, mass shooting incidents and other measures of gun crime.

Despite this evidence, only nine other states and Washington, D.C., have this policy, and Oregon will be the first state to adopt it since Maryland in 2013. In addition, the Oregon initiative institutes a ban on large-capacity magazines – those that hold more than 10 rounds and allow shooters to fire for longer periods before reloading. Bans of these devices have been associated with reductions in mass shootings.

The impact of Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling

The midterms were the first general elections since the Supreme Court set a new standard for evaluating gun laws under the Second Amendment. Under the Bruen ruling, which came down in June 2022, courts must assess whether a gun law is consistent with the “historical tradition of firearm regulation” in the U.S. In its opinion, the court failed to provide an adequate framework for lower courts to use for this analysis. Despite the lack of clarity, this standard will affect implementation of Iowa’s and Oregon’s new policies.

The fact that Iowa’s constitutional amendment requires analysis of state gun laws under a strict scrutiny standard creates a difficult situation for state judges, who may have to grapple with both strict scrutiny and the historical tradition test from the Bruen ruling.

Laws requiring a permit to purchase are popular, but they will almost certainly be challenged either in Oregon or in one of the other nine states with such a policy. For the law to be upheld, a court would need to find that such a law was consistent with the country’s history and tradition of firearm regulation. Rigorous historical analyses have proved difficult for courts.

Despite the confusion created by the Supreme Court, the midterm election results indicate that gun violence remains an important issue for voters and elected officials.

At the state and local level, young candidates who ran campaigns centered on gun violence prevention were elected. Control of some state legislatures and executive branches shifted from one party to the other and, as of this writing, control of the U.S. House of Representatives will come down to several close contests.

The outcomes of these state and local elections will dramatically affect the likelihood that gun violence prevention legislation and programs are considered and implemented in the coming months.The Conversation

 

Alex McCourt, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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79 COMMENTS

  1. “Research has consistently shown that laws requiring a permit to purchase a gun are associated with reductions in homicide, suicide, mass shooting incidents and other measures of gun crime.

    Despite this evidence, only nine other states and Washington, D.C., have this policy” …

    it’s a great policy – or would be for a nationalist country. but the policy is pushed not to enhance training or competence or safety, but rather to establish control – control by the “elite” who think they are the humans and that the rest of us are cattle put here to serve them. they pretend to advance national interest, but it’s just a cover for their own.

    • To go along with attaching guns to the word violence is setting the 2A up for a fall. Instead of holding hands with Gun Control and blindly going along with the label Gun Violence call it what it is: “The Criminal Misuse Of Firearms, Bricks, Bats, Knives, Vehicles, etc.” In other words…”It’s the criminals stupid.”

      • of course “it’s the criminals” (though, of course, that leads to a discussion of who the criminals are ….). but it’s also a matter of competence. mental defectives and blind people, for example, shouldn’t qualify for firearms usage. a permit system, used properly, is not a problem in and of itself.

        • oh it most assuredly IS a problem. A RIGHT must never be dependent upon permission from some fauz authoroty never given responsibility to manage that right. Rights come with NO qualifiers. Conditioins, yes.. the right to vote is terminated when one goes to prison. When released, and the “debt to society” taken care of, the right is restored. Same with the right to arms.
          Unless your actions PROVE beyond doubt you cannot be trusted in public with a firearm, you MUST be trusted in public with a firearm.

          Take yer Mother May I meme and put it where the sun don’t shine.

        • “… a permit system, used properly, is not a problem in and of itself.”

          The hell it isn’t. You may not like it but the 2A is an enumerated right. I am NOT required to purchase a government permit to go to church, read a book, or speak my mind.

          Shove your permit. If instituted, I will NOT comply

          FJB

        • “Rights come with NO qualifiers“

          So let us consider the right to free speech, do you believe that no qualifiers means one is permitted to make any accusation against anyone for any claim, without qualification?

        • MajorStupidity,

          Yeah, that’s pretty much EXACTLY what it means. I can call you a dumb c***, and if you don’t like it, your remedy is to sue me for damages – but then you have to prove my statement is false (and you’d obviously fail there – the old law school joke was “truth is a complete defense”), and then prove that you were actually damaged (with your reputation, even if my obviously true statement was found to be false, a finding of damages would be a stretch).

          Thanks for playing!!!!

        • “Unless your actions PROVE beyond doubt you cannot be trusted in public with a firearm, you MUST be trusted in public with a firearm.”

          the problem with this “ignore common sense” approach is that people wind up dead or cripple before the auto-trust is withdrawn.

          “Rights come with NO qualifiers”

          the problem with this approach to “rights” is it’s never about rights, but the desire of the individual making the claim to act as they please in complete disregard of anyone around them. this is why so many on the new “right” live in semi-isolation – that’s the only way they can achieve their view of “rights”. but when other people are around then yes, rights have qualifiers.

          for these people, the problem isn’t qualifiers or permissions or anything of the sort – they have no problem imposing such requirements on other people themselves – but rather the primary and entire and in fact sole and only problem is Other People.

          the solution to your problem is to move to the alaskan outback. there no-one will bother you or get in your way. free at last, free at last.

    • “Research has consistently shown …”
      Who’s research? Certainly not that of Steve Halbrook or John Lott, nor any others using universally-acceptable methods of acquiring non-biased data by which to conduct the research.

      The Left inevitably begins with the premise that firearms, and especially certain types, in the hands of regular citizens, are overtly unsafe, dangerous, will nearly always be misused, and the survey and conclusions will always be crafted to prove their illogical narrative. It’s nothing new to people who stand with the 2A or the American founding in general but it needs to be stated from the start.

    • About 250 years ago the British tried to enforce some. Resulted in a bit of a kerfuffle as I recall.

      Throughout the 1800’s there have been local authorities who tried enforcing gun-free zones to much the same effect of todays gun-free zone rules. Which is to say they didn’t work worth a damn.

      Federally though, nothing I’ve found.

      • “About 250 years ago the British tried to enforce some”

        that’s incorrect. the colonies implemented a militia system with the crown’s full concurrence, and the crown made no attempt to regulate firearms. it was only when rebellion was in progress that the british attempted to seize any guns at all. that’s not gun control, it’s warfare.

    • Yes.. in the former Confederacy post-war of northern aggression, there were many laws prohibiting “negroes” from the use or possession of arms. Then we had Tim Sullivan, NYC”s evil and corrupt gangboss and Mayor HE got encted the first ‘gun control” laws in the North. He had the law carefully written and skilfully applied so as to render his rival gangs criminals if found in possession of firearms, and his own guys not when THEY were found in the same condition. Served to put signficant pressure on his rival gangs and liberate his own to do as they wished, which they certainly did. Both of those are prior to 1920.

    • “Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,” says Adam Winkler, a professor and specialist in American constitutional law at UCLA School of Law. “Today, you’re allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren’t.” Same goes for most of the New West, to varying degrees, in the once-rowdy frontier towns of Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota.

      Dodge City, Kansas, formed a municipal government in 1878. According to Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, the first law passed was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely by civic leaders and influential merchants who wanted people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families. Cultivating a reputation of peace and stability was necessary, even in boisterous towns, if it were to become anything more transient than a one-industry boom town.

      Laws regulating ownership and carry of firearms, apart from the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, were passed at a local level rather than by Congress. “Gun control laws were adopted pretty quickly in these places,” says Winkler. “Most were adopted by municipal governments exercising self-control and self-determination.”

      https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-180968013/

      How interesting to learn that ‘red states’ such as “Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota” were the first to institute gun control laws, exercising the conservative value of ‘local control’.

      • derp, nice try but fail.
        territories were not under the constitution and did not operate under the same rules.

        as has been established many times, the constitution is the supreme law of the land and anything not in the constitution is considered under the power of the states.
        so that makes the 2nd amendment more powerful then state laws.
        your link does go on the state that people were free to own what they want, so your own link undercuts your past anti-gun statements against sporting rifles and semiauto handguns.

        and that’s not even delving into the controversy about Winkler and his research.

        it’s nice that your own link affirms the right to own firearms.

  2. The only way we’re ever going to end this insanity is for the court to rule all gun controls laws everywhere in every form whatsoever with the exception of convicted criminals currently serving time in state or federal prison or those people entering a courtroom with a trial in progress are unconstitutional Null and void.

    Anything short of that will just result in more “Lawfare” against the people using the money of the taxpayer vs the money of the citizen.

  3. “Despite the confusion created by the Supreme Court,”
    The Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling is confusing to the
    left because the ruling goes against their feelings and
    refusal to accept the ruling just like they refuse to accept
    the 2nd Amendment.

    • exactly precisely correct. to “the left”, their feelings are reality, and anything that impedes those feelings is wickedness – no exaggeration.

  4. “The only way we’re ever going to end this insanity is for the court to rule all gun controls laws everywhere in every form whatsoever with the exception of convicted criminals currently serving time in state or federal prison or those people entering a courtroom with a trial in progress are unconstitutional Null and void.”

    Sorry, Kyle, you are a bit delusional. The “Court” has ruled in some wonderful rulings for the support of 2A over the past decade. Without enforcement, it means very little, especially if one lives in NYS (where Bruen originated), MD, DC, CA, IL, MA, etc.

    “Court” rulings mean very little if enforcement does not take place or judgments are not demanded and collected, and will not until The People vote out the public servants who will support the re-imaging/re-imagining/fundamental transformation of the US in total and in various states that just don’t give a damn. Lawsuits always seem to be a great thing on the surface, but in reality, not so much. Worthless judgements are fairly certain. How much, for example, does anyone think the plaintiffs will ever get from Alex Jones? Go ahead, sue away.

    • “Lawsuits always seem to be a great thing on the surface, but in reality, not so much”

      the left has made great progress with lawsuits for decades. the right can too.

      “How much, for example, does anyone think the plaintiffs will ever get from Alex Jones?”

      the point is not to get anything out of him, but to destroy him. the case against him was never anything more than politics, fronted by a lawsuit. alex has been right for many years, and the left simply saw a way to silence him using a legal process.

      • “alex has been right for many years“

        Really?

        “Alex Jones conceded Wednesday in a Travis County, Texas, court that the murder of 20 schoolchildren and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, was “100% real.”

        The InfoWars radio and web host admitted that it was irresponsible of him to declare that the school shooting was a hoax. The admission came while on the witness stand during his second day providing testimony in a post-default judgment trial that will determine how much he must pay for spreading falsehoods that the massacre didn’t occur.

        Asked by his lawyer, Andino Reynal, if it was irresponsible to broadcast to his audience that the shooting never happened, Jones replied, “It was,” he said pausing for a breath, “especially since I’ve met the parents. It’s 100% real.”

        • Those lawsuits are a joke. The corporate media intentionally gets things wrong on a daily basis. Sometimes lives are ruined as a result. Sometimes lives are lost as a result of their lies. They just move on to the next lie. This is an effort to punish a right winger that became popular.

        • “They just move on to the next lie. This is an effort to punish a right winger that became popular“

          The lies seem to have come from Alex Jones himself, who claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre was a false flag operation.

          Unfortunately, Alex Jones provided no evidence whatsoever to support his claims so the conclusion is he is the liar and intentionally slandered the parents of the dead children, calling them crisis actors.

          Should he be allowed to make those statements under the first amendment, without suffering any consequence?

          If so, may someone come to your neighborhood and post handbills proclaiming you are a pedophile who worships Satan?

        • Slander and lying about a story aren’t always the same thing. AJ got a story very wrong. What I said above is that it’s no different than what the corporate media does on a daily basis. (I’m not defending AJ’s story BTW.) Do they have to payout millions every time they get something wrong? It’s extremely rare. Some had to pay Nick Sandmann, but some of his libel cases were dismissed. The media usually claims they’re discussing public figures and stories, therefore they can push any opinion they want to.

    • AJ will never pay much of anything, if anything at all. Those are rage-judgements and competent money managers will reduce the real-world outcome to a negligible figure.

      The larger question is suing .gov is who you’re really suing. The answer to that is mostly “yourself and everyone else” because any judgement will be covered by the taxpayers or insurance bought with tax dollars.

      So, lawsuits can be useful but, like any tool, becoming dependent on them is unwise.

      The rest of what you’re discussing in terms of enforcement is spot on. There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of old laws that are never enforced but are still on the books. It wouldn’t be socially acceptable to enforce them and so they are ignored.

      For example, several areas in the country still have laws that a woman cannot legally drive unless her husband or another male relation proceeds in front of the vehicle waving red flags to warn other motorists and pedestrians. The law is never enforced so there’s no real impetus to remove the law from the books but it could be enforced and… it is the law.

      The Supreme Court, in some regards, is the same. As Stalin is reputed to have asked, possibly as part of an apocryphal tale, “The Pope. How many divisions has he?”. One could similarly ask what the enforcement mechanism for SCOTUS really is, the answer is that it’s mostly societal.

  5. “In its opinion, the court failed to provide an adequate framework for lower courts to use for this analysis.”

    BS.

    Justice Thomas was very clear. Strict Scrutiny with history and tradition (Thomas explained that to be laws in existence in the Founding era that affected a large segment of the population).

    Since there were few firearms laws in the Founding era, most firearms laws won’t pass the test.

    I guess they could pass a law requiring mustering the militia for regulation.

    • “I guess they could pass a law requiring mustering the militia for regulation”

      sounds good to me. you support the 2nd, you participate in the 2nd.

    • the term “regulated” as in the Second Article of Ammendment means to make regular, to be effecive, able to perform what is necessary. It does NOT mean burdened down by thousands of pages of rules, requirements, restrictions, mandates, laws, etc.

      A militia were considered “well regulated” when they functioined as a miitary unit in effectively accomlishing that which they set out to accomplish. To learn a good example of “well regulated militia” read about what happened at the North Bridge in Concord, Masschussetts around mid-day on 19th April 1775. One side was “well regulated’ the other was most decidedly NOT. One side suffered two casualties, the other side suffered dozens, retreated in panic and disarray, abandoned their assigned posts, and utterly failed to perform as “well regulated’ soldiers” General Gage lost one third of the officers fielded that day in the two volleys discharged by the “well regulated’ team in that little kerfuffle. The “well regulated” team only suiffered the two casualties. And continued to press the poorly regulated militia for the entire way back to Boston, some twenty two miles of continued loss, casualty, diearray, etc. Their commanding general was SO embarrassed he took two weeks to compile his bad news report for his commanding office,r the King of England, and then sent it via slow packet. News about the debacle of that day reached London and the King via another well-regulated means.. a very fast and well sailed coasting vessel owned by a Patriot.

      • The first clause of the 2nd Amendment merely concedes that the nation will require a standing army, using “militia” as a synonym for “military”. Therefore, it concludes, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. You know, in case the federal or a state government should use any of it’s armed power against the people. It blatantly acknowledges the absolute right to self-defense. To shoot back.

  6. Hey Alex you want to site the research regarding magazine limits and permits both of which are ignored by criminals? Alec Baldwin still hasn’t been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and he was holding a 6 shooter single action and only fired one bullet. So who are you kidding. You don’t know the first thing about gun research. 2/3 of all firearm deaths are suicides not homicides. Rifles of all types make up an insignificant number of deaths in homicides. We lost over 100,000 people to drug overdoses in the past year. Don’t hear too many of you college professors coming up with a solution for that and its probably cause most of you are on drugs. Get your facts straignt or report the actual research you are citing.

  7. I don’t think this election helped gun rights very much.

    In certain states like Florida they might, now that it’s become pretty solid red. But democrats won enough across the country to keep their status quo for the most part.

    • The emboldening is already showing.

      Based on behavior I suspect, but can’t prove, that the high muckity mucks in the GOP basically took a dive in this election.

      Why exactly is a fairly long post that I don’t care to write at this time but basically I think it comes down to two things.

      1. They don’t want a “wave” followed by a bunch of crises that can be pinned on them by the media. Better to let things fall apart under those currently in power and let them take the blame. Standard mid-wit middle manager tactics. Avoid blame at all costs.

      2. They view this as an opportunity to “cleanse” the GOP of what they view as a MAGA problem. TPTB within the GOP are not interested in letting MAGA do to the Republicans what Progressives did to the Democrats.

      Personally, I think #2 is off-base but I don’t have much say with the higher-ups in the GOP.

      • #2 is correct. The “MAGA” problem is a populist problem. Wall Street misses the old Republican party. They don’t feel good about only depending on Democrats. They don’t just want the old Republican party back. They want both parties. A populist movement from the right or the left causes major problems for them.

        Thinking about #1: Maybe someone can fill me in on this. Was Lindsey Graham always known as a big pro-life guy? I’m not talking about being for something because it’s politically convenient. I mean from the beginning, was the pro-life movement always his number one priority? I don’t think it was. What was the point in him introducing pro-life legislation under Democrat control right before the mid-terms, months after the SC overruled Roe? It served no purpose. Or did it?

        Another reason for #1: Republican control means less to leadership than having people that will work with them. It’s about them and their power, not any benefit to the country.

      • The GOP is going to take a big hit in places like Pennsylvania. The Tea Party/America First/MAGA Republicans became a substantial voting base for the Republicans.

        The population of Pennsylvania is slowly decreasing and it is that base that is moving out. The Democrats already have a 7% registration advantage over the Republicans. The PA GOP has surrendered the state to the Democrats for at least a generation.

        • P.S. – “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

          — John F Kennedy

        • “The PA GOP has surrendered the state to the Democrats for at least a generation.

          Probably several.

          The Democrats are really rather good at fighting in a multilayered manner. The GOP, not so much. I’m honestly surprised that many of them can walk and chew gum at the same time without serious injury.

          In some regards it’s like watching a brown belt and a white belt roll where the white belt wants to go hard. The difference is that the white belt, generally, learns over time and so gets better.

          But then the white belt also doesn’t have to deal with “the grassroots” which range from intelligent to dumb as shit.

        • “The GOP, not so much. I’m honestly surprised that many of them can walk and chew gum at the same time without serious injury“

          You are correct, with the GOP, adherence to their delusional narrative is much more important than actual rational thought.

          “Jade Helm is REAL!!!”

      • There’s plenty.

        The first question that should be asked in every political post-mortem is not “Why did we fail?”. The first question that should be asked is “What were we really offering?”.

        If you can articulate the latter in concrete terms then you may have a messaging issue, ground game problem etc. If you can’t, which the GOP certainly can’t, then the issue isn’t a salesmanship problem. It’s far, far deeper than that.

        A store with nothing to sell has no revenue, as it were.

        • or a store with the wrong things to sell will end up in the same boat. KNOW your market, find out what they are buying, and sell THAT. Unless you do that, you will go hungry.

    • run bad candidates….expect bad results…the dems chose to support them in the opposition party and the strategy largely worked…the repubs have some soul-searching to do…look back or look forward…

      • Bad candidates? Lurch from PA can barely put together a sentence, much less a coherent one. He won. The AZ governor candidate hid and refused to debate her opponent. She won. Have you seen who’s occupying the White House? I think there’s more to the story than “bad candidates.”

        • Both this midterm and the 2020 General Election have many statistical anomalies that have a very, very low probability of occuring together.

          There is definitely something fishy but it seems impossible to identify. Maybe that’s why the Democrats don’t like the idea of Trump running; they might have to do something so obvious and large that they get caught.

          if Republicans could figure out how to do the same to the Democrats, the Democrats would immediately demand voter ID and a ban on mail-in voting.

        • What was Oz selling to the people of PA that was demonstrably better than what Fetterman was selling?

          What made Oz stand out as someone to vote in favor of rather than someone to cast a protest vote for?

          “He’s brain damaged, I’m not” is both desperate and unlikely to work. People have been elected while in jail or prison and while residing in a graveyard. As such, Fetterman is, at worst, selling himself as a placeholder vis a vis national D policy which is something we know people will buy in large numbers.

          What’s Oz’s counter to that?

        • I feel like you’re underrating a functioning brain. Seriously though, if we go along with your line of thinking that Fetterman is a placeholder D vote in the senate, then any Democrat would have won in PA. For what it’s worth, I think Oz is essentially terrible, but McCormick wasn’t some grand conservative and Barnette lacked name recognition. I don’t see anything that proves they would have fared any better against Lurch.

          A legitimate counter would be to say they wouldn’t vote for any new spending. That’s a hard sell considering that big name Republicans have been voting for the Puppet’s spending proposals.

        • It’s not the underrating of a functioning brain that gets you in trouble. It’s overestimating how common such a thing is.

          Further, the win of a placeholder is just that and nothing more. It doesn’t reflect on other hypothetical candidates who may have offered something more saleable. It simply means that, in effect, the people prefer the general status quo to the alternative which they were offered.

          Senate races are often run as being “What I’ll do for the state” but people are actually (shockingly) more realistic about it. They know a Senator does national level stuff and that’s not going to cover “crime in Phili”, “potholes in Allentown” or “the influx of junkies to Nesquehoning” .

          Therefore a Senate race is a combination of candidate + perception of the national party to which the candidate belongs. You need to match the candidate to the location and you need to give them the freedom to run against the party’s grain if needed.

          Which is why, historically, if a candidate for Senate or the House is running in certain areas they run on a platform that contains some significant threads of “I’ll stand up to the party leadership in Washington, and here’s HOW I’ll do it”.

          That’s realistic and offer one that sells a vision. That’s sellable. That can be made inspiring.

          “I’m not brain damaged” is what you say when you want people to think “Oh, God, is he on suicide watch?” or five minutes before you do head out to the garage looking for a rope and a chair.

          Oz ran a campaign that was awful because, honestly, Oz is awful. Look at his response to being tagged as a “carpetbagger”. He didn’t get the label off, he convinced damn near everyone that it was true.

        • Well, Oz wasn’t a brain damaged village idiot Marxist that pulled a shotgun on a innocent black man in a public park.

          There’s that.

          One of the issues in Pennsylvania was that many early mail-in voters cast ballots for Fetterman before the debate.

        • I agree the early mail-in votes were a factor. They may have been the deciding factor just like hiding the Hunter laptop story. Democrats are very good at lying to their voters.

        • “the 2020 General Election have many statistical anomalies that have a very, very low probability of occuring together“

          Would you be kind enough to cite specific examples to support your assertion?

        • 1.4 million mail-in ballots and for six days after the debate the top Google search in PA was how to change a vote after a mail-in was cast.

          None of which is particularly material to what Oz was and was not. If nothing more than delaying a debate is enough to snooker several hundred thousand voters then the R’s need a different ground game to compete.

          It’s that simple.

  8. Another load of crap from yet another “medical researcher” wandering waaaaay tf out of his lane. Debunked ultra-biased “studies” used to push a Marxist agenda.
    I’d love to see John Lott address this specific load of crap publicly and soon.

  9. Somewhat unsurprisingly given the author, this reads almost exactly like the introduction to a grant proposal.

    It’s only missing the “question we need to answer” section at the end. Other than that, you can apply the standard introduction to a grant proposal rubric and find that this follows it to a T.

  10. Odd that Assistant Professor Alex McDingleberry only quoted “research” that supported his feelings and desired results. Using the same FBI tables can also give the results, that a number of other highly qualified researchers have illustrated, that increased firearm ownership, permitted or otherwise, has a negligible effect on major crimes. He also ignores the myriad of other categories of death-inducing methods – fists, hammers, blunt instruments, knives, etc – in his anti-gun rhetoric. You’d think that he would be more concerned with the 100K deaths annually from narcotic overdoses…or the thousands of children beaten or shaken to death annually when professing, from his vaunted Ivy Tower, matters of Public Policy.

    McDingleberry, you are a shill abusing your title and position for personal and/or political (financial?) gain…shame on you for claiming to be a science-based (data driven) “Researcher”.

    • I guess you heard about the University Of Idaho students murdered In Moscow, ID a couple days ago.
      I’m guessing it was jealous butt-hurt boy friend of one of the females murdered. There were three girls and a boy from the west coast of Washington killed.

      They were stabbed to death.

    • I see you’re not familiar with the modern approach to “writing in the sciences” and the rubric for writing a grant proposal.

      See, the deal here is that the “data are characters in a story you’re telling” to the target audience (the body reviewing your proposal). As such, you don’t acknowledge competing data because that’s not what gets grants. Grants are competitive the proposal that seems best is the one that gets first crack at the money. The proposal that sows doubt in it’s own hypothesis is order probably the most honest and it is definitely orders of magnitude less likely to get the grant.

      As I pointed out elsewhere if follows the rubric for a grant proposal exactly but omits the “question to be answered by this research”. Other than that, it’s a grant proposal minus the official citation style.

      This article reads like a grant proposal because that’s basically what it is. It’s either a draft to be used as a proposal later or it’s a proposal already in the works that’s been modified very, very slightly to turn it into an article that a “science journalist” would find appealing. You see exactly this behavior in biology and astronomy ALL the time.

  11. Every Governor that passed constitutional carry in their state won re-election. Florida doesn’t have it yet but Desantis said he would sign it into law if it gets on his desk.

  12. Rigorous historical analyses have proved difficult for courts.

    What a bunch of hooey. Rigorous historical analysis is easy.

    What is difficult for True Believer Progressive courts? Answer: finding what they want in the historical record–because what they want did not exist in the relevant historical time frame (1776 – 1840).

    • The “relevant historical time frame” is the issue.

      Not the existence or non-existence of things the Progs like. Things like that are what “lies” were invented to fix.

  13. From the Bloomberg school of public health, classes include:
    Guns 101-guns r bad, mmkay
    Comm 100-standing on a soapbox, literally and figuratively
    HLTH 100-sexual harassment, ndas, and your bank account
    Afr. Stud. 101-stop, frisk, disarm

  14. “health policy and management”, and “Johns Hopkins University”

    That is Bloomburg’s outfit these days, and that outfit has much to do with how the WooFlew was mangled in this country. They were one of the “expert institutions” continually consulted for how to mismanage the covidiocy.

    And he expects us to buy his pabulum on guns? Dream on, sucker.

  15. I would have thought whites out numbered blacks in the homicides department. Easier to see in the dark, slower,most get rattled under gunmfire, seems like theyd be easier. Ohhh wait, duh on me.
    Well that’s just to bad, because everytime an out law does something bad they pass an Infringement that only effects the law abiding.
    The plan wont work. It might for awhile. All really depends on how fast and how far advanced ” they can take the concept of robotics and artificial intelligence.

  16. Mass ‘knifing’ > Four Idaho college students were killed in a ‘targeted attack’ with an ‘edged weapon,’ police say > https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/four-idaho-college-students-were-killed-in-a-targeted-attack-with-an-edged-weapon-police-say/ar-AA1494ZC?OCID=ansmsnnews11

    “Police in Idaho said Tuesday they believe an ‘edged weapon,’ such as a knife, was used in the ‘targeted attack’ on the four students, shedding light on a case that has left a shocked local community grappling with unanswered questions.’ ”

    just to mention….~1,300 criminal knife attacks on victims daily in the United States. They rarely make the news even when there are deaths.

  17. “views toward guns also played a significant role. Indeed, a survey by Edison Research found that around 1 in 10 voters listed gun policy as their top concern.”

    Here’s Edison Research again – the bastion of research slight-of-hand slant.

    First it was not 1 out of 10. It was “About one out of 10 voters said gun policy was their top concern in deciding how to vote.” – look in the link provided. See that word ‘ABOUT’ – anytime you see the word ‘About’ in ‘research’ in relation to a sample group size with statistically insignificant small sample groups (which 10 is) with round numbers there is probably some slanted and missing data hanky-panky going on. This election is an event where millions participated and at a minimum the sample size should have been 1000 and not 10.

    The actual number was 0.01% which is 1 voter out of 1,000 voters which is statistically insignificant. So in the link they say its “about” which would be true in the strictest sense because anything greater than zero but less than one can be claimed to be ‘about’ one because its approaching one. So the ‘about’ means ‘less than one’ and there is the slight of hand slant, if you look behind the data you will find its a decimal number e.g. ‘0.01’ which with rounded small sample group numbers less than 100 is statistically insignificant.

    The next bit of slant is in this article its self is with this > “found that around 1 in 10 voters” – the word ‘around’. First, a number less than 1 is not ‘around’ 1, it is always less than one. A number can be said to be ‘around’ another value if it can be either greater or less than the value but not the next higher or lower whole value. Numbers less than 1 are not ‘around’ one, they are less than one.

    So, in context, lets pretend their sample group size of 10 is valid and ‘about’, it means LESS THAN 1 person in 10 thought gun policy was a concern.

    But lets place it in the context of the Johns Hopkins missive. In their context, they are talking about ‘gun policy’ in the gun control sense of restricting/infringing second amendment rights. Now go back to edison research they used to start building their missive context ‘theory’ and plug it in in what really is and that is LESS THAN 1 person in 10 thought gun policy was a concern.

    And this whole missive is filled with one big anti-gun bias and purposely ignores the many independent and peer reviewed and validated research which debunks their narrative.

    • clarification correction for : “Here’s Edison Research again – the bastion of research slight-of-hand slant.”

      That should have been

      Here’s Edison Research again – the bastion of others research slight-of-hand slant.

      “others” in this case being Reuters and Alex McCourt, Johns Hopkins University

  18. “Oregon voters passed an initiative that requires a permit to buy a firearm and bans large capacity ammunition magazines.” and apparently other prog states.

    Clearly violates the Constitution and restated/confirmed in 2022 under Bruen. Sue the bastards.

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