By Lee Williams
The U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., v Bruen, which lifted restrictions on carrying defensive firearms and changed forever how lower courts must adjudicate Second Amendment challenges, has created a massive amount of pushback.
Bruen was a big win for gun owners, because the Second Amendment is no longer to be treated as a second-class right. In response, Democratic lawmakers have been introducing Bruen response laws that they know are unconstitutional. Many have similar language, which indicates it’s an organized campaign, most likely by the White House.
Lawmakers aren’t the only ones throwing tantrums and pushing back against one of the most significant Second Amendment opinions ever. Now, a group of doctors have released “research” that specifically targets the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, and the activist docs have thrown in two more high-court opinions – COVID mandates and abortion – just for good measure.
The doctors’ report, which they called an “original investigation” was published Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA. We’ll let readers decide for themselves what they think of the docs’ COVID and abortion findings, but their Bruen research speaks for itself.
Their results are sophomoric and more than a little silly. However, what the report makes crystal clear is the need to zealously monitor any attempt to use taxpayer dollars to fund anti-gun “research,” or we’ll end up neck-deep in biased agitprop such as this.
The research
In their report, which is titled: “Projected Health Outcomes Associated With 3 US Supreme Court Decisions in 2022 on COVID-19 Workplace Protections, Handgun-Carry Restrictions, and Abortion Rights,” the researchers tried to ascertain the “probable health consequences” of the three decisions.
Interestingly, they only considered anti-gun jurisdictions named in the Bruen case: California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia, but acknowledged that the decision, “could have much broader impacts, potentially culminating in the lower courts invalidating numerous gun regulations throughout the nation.” That much is certainly true.
The researchers then “estimated” – think wild-ass guess – how the restoration of gun rights would impact 2020 firearm death statistics in the seven jurisdictions, using three estimates: low (0% effect on gun deaths), middle (4.5% increase), or high estimate (a 9% increase).
Inherent bias
The researchers attacked the Bruen decision right from the start, quoting one anti-gun scholar, John Donahue, who noted . . .
Bruen has created an unworkable and largely nonsensical standard for evaluating gun regulations based on history when the history has very little to say about wise policy today. Hopefully, the standard will not be used to invalidate important tools to address gun violence, such as state bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, red flag laws, safe storage laws, waiting periods, and other sensible measures designed to reduce the large social costs of gun violence in America. But the standard is so vague and malleable that this Supreme Court will be able to sustain – or strike down – any of these measures and many more.
Dubious sources
For their report, the researchers used a variety of notable anti-gun and left-leaning sources, some of which include the following: The Washington Post, Politico, The New York Times, JAMA, The Los Angeles Times, the Duke Center for Firearm Law, The Boston Globe, and The Trace, the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun empire.
The researchers also admitted they used Twitter, Instagram and Facebook posts as sources.
Findings
Sticking their finger firmly into the wind, the Bruen decision, the researchers found, “will result in the rain 152 additional firearm-related deaths annually,” adding, “We also projected 377 additional nonfatal firearm-related injuries (with lower and upper bounds of 0 and 754). These injuries include an estimated 29 serious head or neck injuries, 51 serious chest injuries, 37 serious abdominal or pelvic injuries, and 77 serious extremity injuries in our primary scenario.”
Takeaways
Anything the Journal of the American Medical Association publishes about guns is immediately suspect, because the AMA has taken the position that “gun violence” is a public health crisis. The AMA created a gun violence prevention task force, which has more than 30 policy recommendations, most of which would infringe upon our Second Amendment rights.
Just as in another recent anti-gun JAMA article, this latest report illustrates the time-tested GIGO principle – garbage in, garbage out. It’s hard to take the authors’ work seriously when their sources include The Trace, a bevy of hoplophobic liberal newspapers, and social media posts.
As to the report itself, the idea that of a handful of activist doctors could somehow estimate the number of casualties attributed to a Supreme Court ruling in six states and the District of Columbia is downright laughable. Like so many JAMA articles, this one is nothing more anti-gun agitprop thinly disguised as medical research.
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This story is part of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and is published here with their permission.