“After the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., people across the country went out and bought guns,” npr.org reports. “A study published Thursday concludes that a subsequent increase in gun exposure led to more accidental firearm deaths than otherwise would have occurred in the months after the school shooting.” Sixty more, in fact . . .
More spree killings -> more calls for gun control -> more gun sales -> more death! In the words of the study’s author, Wellesley College Economics professor Phillip Levine, “Introducing unsuccessful gun control legislation isn’t necessarily helping. It may be hurting.”
Notice how the good Professor leaves the door open to the possibility of positive benefits for “successful” gun control legislation. And weasels on his own anti-gun control conclusion: “It may be hurting.”
Be that as it is, aside from papers prepared by John “More Stats, More Glazed Eyes” Lott, every study on “gun violence” leads to the conclusion that gun control is a good thing, not a bad thing. And that more of it would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
Given their obvious bias, faulty logic and unsupportable conclusions, the anti-gun rights eggheads seem to be divorced from reality. True story? Are they insane?
Yes
YES.
They know what they are doing, and they think we are too stupid to see it.
This. A million times this. They are not insane at all. They know exactly what they are doing. After all, they are way, WAY smarter than we are. And they just cant understand why us un-intelligent pus brains can’t see how right they are.
They know exactly what they are doing.
Keeping lying until it is accepted as truth.
They know which side their bread is buttered on. They do their masters’ bidding.
It’s the same self-serving pseudoscience out of academia as with the so-called anthropogenic global warming. (Although, when it became obvious facts didn’t support that, they switched labels to the infinitely elastic “climate change”.)
Anytime you have some massive, unwieldy issue that does not lend itself to tidy and conclusive assessment through personal assessment, then you’re going to have highly educated partisans cooking the books and publishing inponderably dense studies alleging to prove their side.
I thought we covered this topic yesterday… ah, I see – we rephrased the question.
Alright then, Jonathan is right – these researchers are the professional equivalent of the nerd in high school jocks would pay to write book reports for them. They will cheerfully crank out whatever pseudo-scientist sounding bile the clients want to pay for to support the pre-determined conclusion they want.
The self-described “researchers” are not insane, but what they do does support the evil intentions of their sponsors (see yesterday’s post).
They are professional fiction writers who sell out their academic integrity for money; if they were desperately addicted women in provocative clothing loitering in front of seedy convenience stores we would have a different word for them.*
ðŸ¤
*sorry, I can’t summon up as much eloquence for this particular brand of gun bigot today any more than I could wax philosophical about the virtues and beauty of a common vulture.
Vulture’s are ugly I must say, they’re pretty to watch soar on an updraft though.
Well said. I would add that one can cut through their facade when addressing high crime, ostensibly gun-free, urban zones and their inability or refusal to acknowledge the root causes of disproportionate rates of gun crime.
“Question of the Day: Are Gun Control Researchers Insane?”
Crazy like a fox.
They get government grant $$$$$ to do a study that reaches pre-paid for conclusions, then they donate $$$ to (D) causes and candidates. It’s money laundering, with a theft of federal funds by the POS (D) kicker.
Is little Phillip insane? Maybe.
Are anti-civil rights bigots disordered? Yes, their irrational fear and hatred of gun owners is clearly evidence of severe mental illness.
Are pretend “eggheads” who start with conclusions and select/distort data to support their propaganda psychotic? Maybe. They may not be capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy, they may just be liars.
My question to this researcher was the data he used current or did it include the 100 misreported accidental deaths due to a data entry error from Tennessee in 2014?
http://archive.knoxnews.com/news/local/tennessee-five–not-105–accidental-gunshot-deaths-in-2014-3d58d2e8-3175-4c78-e053-0100007fd3fb-394743171.html/
I’ll bet some of the same people predicted Clinton would win the election too!
Aha! But if Hitlery had won there would have been a spike in gun sales which they claim would cause a spike in accidental deaths. So she wouldn’t have been helping, but instead hurting, to use their logic. LOL
I just did a CDC WONDER query on mortality statistics for 2010 through 2015, and found that accidental firearm deaths continued to decline in 2013 & 2014. They did blip upwards in 2015, but not even back up to 2013 levels. In fact, the decline for 2013 and 2014 almost exactly matches the rate of decline that already existed in 2012, and exceeded the rate of decline in 2011.
In other words, they must have pulled some nifty statistical tricks to take a decline in accidental firearm deaths after an increase in gun sales, and turn it around 180 degrees.
He’s an economics professor, it’s very likely that he is invested in the Firearms industry and all the accessories that are produced. Just like Al Gore owning, buying and leasing property in South Beach Florida even though he said that property should have been under water a few years ago. They know exactly where the cash flow is and they have to have something to fund their leftist agenda.
Of course they’re insane…
Some of them are insane. Some of them are just evil.
” . . .a subsequent increase in gun exposure led to more accidental firearm deaths than otherwise would have occurred in the months after the school shooting . . .”
Junk science. This is like saying an increase in commuting distance contributes to traffic deaths or that people renting hotel rooms prefer comfortable beds to uncomfortable beds.
Oh, look, the statisticians are claiming that noise in the data is somehow evidence. Come back when the numbers you’re dealing with aren’t two orders of magnitude smaller than the noise band. Quite frankly, accidental gun deaths are about as statistically irrelevant as people getting killed by cows falling from space. The reality is that these clowns are not insane. They are fully aware of exactly what they are promoting an why. Much as the pet “scientists” that national and international socialists always manage to dig up to support their political drivel about, gun control, a “master race”, or “the inevitable march of the proletariat”… Sadly, each generation has only a handful of truly talented scientists doing actual research. The rest of the labcoat stuffers still need to eat, and can be found pumping out political drivel for grant money.
I have observed before that I don’t think these so-called researchers understand the term “order of magnitude”. This is just more evidence that supports my conclusion.
I wonder if these same people would call an $11 decrease in the national median annual income, “a substantial decline in wages,” or some such nonsense.
Yes. Inane too.
This article is confusing to follow. The report is trying to say “gun control = more guns = bad.” If you just call the researcher a crazy person across the board, your message isn’t clear. So do you disagree that gun control is bad because it results in increased gun sales? Or is it that you do agree that “more guns” is bad because it results in more deaths? Because they’re making both points here.
It’s been known for some time that the people who pay for a study generally end up with a study that supports the conclusions they want.
That’s why the government set up many of the grant programs that it did, in an attempt to remove that bias.
In theory it’s a good idea but in practice the grant agencies become politicized and the bias comes back in, often in worse ways. “Climate Change” grants are an example of this but PC creates even worse examples.
A friend of mine worked as a researcher for a major hospital. When it came time to re-up grant proposals they often put them in the hands of a woman who specializes in such work. She was a black lesbian and she was very rarely turned down, even when the proposal was nutty. Probably because she was a trifecta of PC. No one wants to turn down the proposal from someone who’s a triple protected class.
Taking the study authors’ arguments at face value, they claim that 3 million more guns were purchased than would normally be found in the six-month window after the Sandy Hook shootings. They conclude that this influx of millions of new gun owners resulted in 60 more accidental shootings. So far, this seems credible: Add millions of new gun owners, many of whom made their purchases hurriedly to avoid potential new restrictions, and you will have some number who fail to understand basic safety precautions involved in handling, cleaning, and storing firearms.
Of course, that’s not the whole story. 2012 saw violent crime rates in the US rise slightly from the previous year, with a total of 14,866 homicides. After Sandy Hook, violent crime rates dropped significantly. 2013 saw a significant drop in violent crime in the US, with a total of 14,196 homicides. Dr. John Lott’s work has repeatedly shown that increased gun sales correlate with decreased violent crime rates, so we can conclude that the increase in gun sales SAVED approximately 670 lives.
But that’s not the result they have been paid to find. If facts are not supporting ordered outcome of study, find any part of it that does and scrap the rest.
As others here have said (if not in so many words), gun-control “researchers” aren’t insane. They’re professional liars.
The truth about guns in our society is easy for anyone to see. Graph 30 years of the FBI’s yearly violent crime reports and put them next to a graph of yearly NICS checks. The gun sales keep going up and up and up. And where does violent crime go? Down.
The anti-gun researchers and their presstitute allies are paid to obscure the simple truth.
“Given their obvious bias, faulty logic and unsupportable conclusions, the anti-gun rights eggheads seem to be divorced from reality. True story? Are they insane?”
10-4.
Does “insane” mean their “conclusions” say one thing, while their evidence demonstrates something else? They, yes, they are insane.
Not necessarily insane, but totally ideological and unscientific. Gun control researchers who are pro-gun control like to claim gun violence is a public health issue, which basically let’s them start from the get-go with the “truism” that guns are bad for a society. For example, nobody has to first determine whether an epidemic of Ebola, smallpox, typhoid, cholera, etc…has benefits for a society. It’s known at the start that it’s a bad thing. Whereas to properly research the subject of guns in a society, one must first look at both the positives and the negatives. But that requires looking at it from a non-public health point-of-view, such as for example a criminological point-of-view. And to claim that gun violence is a public health issue is really absurd, because why people use guns to kill other people is an issue of criminology, not public health.
The issue of suicides with guns and whether guns increase suicides, and accidental shootings, could be an area of public health, but in terms of homicides, that is criminology. It’s like studying the difference between the causes of car accidents versus why people run over other people with cars.
Progun folks don’t fund research. We fund lobbyists. If we funded science instead of buying votes we would whip the crap out of the antigun folks. Meanwhile, flawed science beats no science.
From just the context of this article, he is clearly not insane. He’s smart.
From a quick google search, he appears to be a leftist who wants to advance leftist policies. So he does a study to show that if more people have guns are more people are likely to have accidents with guns. And what does that study tend to indicate? That every new gun comes with 0.00002 accidental deaths. So, by the time I have 50,000 guns, somebody is probably going to accidentally get killed by one of them. (That’s not how it actually works, but it does illustrate the principal). That is a cost of having guns available. Philip wants to look into the costs of having guns available because he is a leftist. He is examining and proving costs while ignoring benefits. Therefore he is not insane based on these actions in relation to his assumed goals. (His goals might be insane).
Now, it is important to know the costs of gun ownership. It is also important to know the benefits of gun ownership. Only when knowing the costs and benefits of a thing, do we know what the rational choice is. From Lott’s “eye glazing” work, we can see that the benefits of firearms in the hands of responsible people greatly outweighs the costs of having them and the benefits from government regulations against them.
As a side note, Lott isn’t the only one, and all statistical analysis is extremely boring (even when one understands it).