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"Among the study's limitations, Iwama notes that the data collected from the FBI was not complete because of changes in reporting practices. In addition, the pe

"Among the study's limitations, Iwama notes that the data collected from the FBI was not complete because of changes in reporting practices. In addition, the percentage of firearms licenses, which she used as a proxy for gun ownership, represents neither a perfect measure of gun owners nor an accurate count of the number of firearms available by county. Finally, the small size of the study's sample hindered the author's ability to examine patterns across different counties in the state." Doesn't sound that convincingly rigorous.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Doesn't sound that convincingly rigorous. It can't really be rigorous no matter how hard you try or how good the researcher's intentions are. The elephant in the room here when studying gun laws is that they're pretty much exclusively used to gain bargaining leverage for plea deals and never actually make it to a courtroom because the state is scared of drawing federal ire on appeal so they don't really make it into statistics. Regardless of where you stand on gun control it seems like a fool's errand to measure the efficacy of something that's intended to be enforced in an informal manner behind closed doors between prosecutors and lawyers ("plead guilty to the DUI and we'll forget about that pistol in your car") deferentially applicable in the first place (vs something like murder or speeding where being rich don't make you more capable of doing those things within the letter of the law) and can't be enforced at scale. That said, if all you want is to establish correlation between "law passed" and "crime reduced" it's easy to validate/disporve that such correlation exists.