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Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak?
- monochromatic 14y agoBecause partisans are not interested in solid science. They are interested in getting their way.
- CamperBob2 14y agoExactly. No one on the pro-gun control side looks too closely at the statistics because they don't like what they see. Namely that the odds of someone who isn't suicidal and who isn't involved in criminal activity dying from a gunshot wound are about the same as the odds of being hit by a wayward meteor.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- brazzy 14y agoThanks for proving the GP's point so nicely.
- CamperBob2 14y agoIf hyperbole were a valid method of proof, I suppose the world would be a funnier place, perhaps even a less violent one. Maybe we could revisit the laws of rhetoric after we're done nerfing the Second Amendment.
- necubi 14y agoCome on now. The odds of being hit by a meteor (actually meteorite) are effectively nil [0]. Are you claiming that the 88 people shot in mass shooting last year [1] were all suicidal or criminals? And really, while mass shootings get all the news attention, they are only a tiny part of the problem. The real tragedy is the way easy access to handguns has transformed communities like the South Side of Chicago, where kids are gunned down every week. This American Life recently did a remarkable report [3] on the conditions in and around one Chicago high school where in the past year 29 current and former students were shot. That reporting could have just as easily been done in Oakland, or Detroit. This is not about ideology. People are dying every day, innocent people going about their lives, and our current strategy of doing nothing, of burying our heads in the sand, is accomplishing...nothing. [0] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/12/insurance-from-the-skies/#.UTPRKl5QCTM http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/12/in... [1] http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootings-happened-2012-84-dead http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootin... [3] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...
- DamnYuppie 14y agoSo what do you want to do about the innocent people dying from drunk drivers?
- gradstudent 14y agoYour comparison is a red herring. Cars are useful and beneficial devices that enhance our lives. Guns are weapons intended to kill. They have zero utility to people who are not farmers or members of the police or military. That leaves recreational hunting as the sole activity for which one could justifiably claim gun ownership as a necessity. You don't need a hand cannon or a semi-automatic assault rifle to hunt deer. Seriously, fuck guns.
- CamperBob2 14y agoThey have zero utility to people who are not farmers or members of the police or military. These would be the same organizations (well, excluding farmers, I suppose) who killed about a hundred million of their own countrymen in the twentieth century alone? Yeah, I can see where allowing the government to hold a monopoly on the use of force is a really bright idea. Good thinking there, Tex.
- monochromatic 14y agoNow now. Anyone named Tex would probably not hold such wrong-headed beliefs about guns :)
- gradstudent 14y ago> These would be the same organizations (well, excluding farmers, I suppose) who killed about a hundred million of their own countrymen in the twentieth century alone? Yeah, I can see where allowing the government to hold a monopoly on the use of force is a really bright idea. The right to bear arms is an anachronism that needs to be scrapped. Two points: 1. Civilian small arms are useless against an organised modern military. If your government wanted to tyrannise you, they would and all the AR15s in the world wouldn't save you. 2. If you do not trust your government, elect a new one. If that doesn't work, move.
- nazgulnarsil 14y agoExactly. No one on the anti-gun control side looks too closely at the statistics because they don't like what they see. Namely that the odds of someone who isn't suicidal and who isn't involved in criminal activity dying from a gunshot wound are about the same as the odds of being hit by a wayward meteor. see how silly you're being?
- free652 14y agoBecause the data doesn't really back up the either side in USA. USA is really violent for a western civilization The only correlation is identified that poorer regions have more violence, regardless of guns. Guns doesn't really play a big role at all, according to the statistics. Of course one thing the statistics cannot account for that guns are available in any state.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cobrausn 14y agoAnother thing we don’t have is reliable, long-term data on where the guns that are actually used in crimes come from. One of the ways we legislate gun use is through registration programs and systems that limit who can buy a gun legally. But if we don’t know whether guns used in crimes are purchased legally, illegally, or purchased legally and then sold or given illegally to a third party, we have no idea how to craft those laws or even if they make any difference at all. I consider this a huge problem. How can you have a well-regulated militia if you don't know who is in it? How do we know any of our gun laws have any effect at all?
- sc68cal 14y agoBecause Republicans and the Gun Lobby have systematically shut down any attempt to collect and study any data about guns. Over the past two decades, the NRA has not only been able to stop gun control laws, but even debate on the subject. The Centers for Disease Control funds research into the causes of death in the United States, including firearms — or at least it used to. In 1996, after various studies funded by the agency found that guns can be dangerous, the gun lobby mobilized to punish the agency. First, Republicans tried to eliminate entirely the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the bureau responsible for the research. When that failed, Rep. Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas, successfully pushed through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget (the amount it had spent on gun research in the previous year) and outlawed research on gun control with a provision that reads: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/the_nras_war_on_gun_science/ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/the_nras_war_on_gun_science/
- MrMember 14y agoThe CDC isn't allowed to conduct research into gun violence because they didn't even try to hide the fact that they were horribly biased. Here's a quote from Mark Rosenberg, former director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and the guy who led a personal crusade against guns under the guise of 'research': "We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. Now it is dirty, deadly, and banned." He had no interest in conducting unbiased research, he wanted to treat gun ownership like a disease, and did everything in his power to try and 'eradicate' it.
- vanderZwan 14y agoIf you were studying gun use, and you wanted to know how often guns were used in self-defense, how would you categorize Charles Wellford’s experience? Preemptive gun use. Bam, done. Any other categorisations required?
- brazzy 14y agoPreempting what, exactly? Seems to me like objectively, in the given situation the only effect of the gun being present vs. not being present was to increase the likelihood of a tragic accident.
- vanderZwan 14y agoYou are probably referring to the way the word is used in a computer programming context. I was talking about this: "A preemptive war is a war that is commenced in an attempt to repel or defeat a perceived offensive or invasion, or to gain a strategic advantage in an impending (allegedly unavoidable) war before that threat materializes."
- brazzy 14y agoAnd I was talking about the fact that in the example the gun was brought in preparation to an imagined but unspecific and actually not existing threat.
- arjie 14y agoThis illustrates the problem rather well. The case where I ready my weapon in preparation for violence vs. when I use my weapon to stop an anticipated threat are both preemptive uses of the weapon. The definition is unclear and one researcher may use one definition while another might use the other. Both cases are distinct, however. In one case, I am actually preemptively using the weapon and in the other, I am merely carrying it in anticipation of use. Part of the article is a discussion of the fact that such definitions are muddied and lost as statistics are looked at.
- jarrett 14y ago
- dwc 14y agoPerhaps a better title would have been "Science versus gun violence research: why would we expect meaningful answers?" Given someone with critical thinking skills who is well versed in scientific methods, they would quickly move to asking why violence is a problem. Why are there so many violent crimes in the U.S. compared to Canada? With a huge number of guns in Canada, why aren't their gun violence stats similar to the U.S.? But very few people seem interested in that line of questioning. Instead, we get pro-gun vs. anti-gun arguments. And of course the media and the public feed into this as well. It's just so easy to think something as symbolic as guns must be the problem and/or solution. But this is a much deeper problem, and one that is in desperate need of more attention.
- scarmig 14y agoEven though the contemporary Michael Moore (rightly, IMO) gets a bad rep, Bowling for Columbine is fundamentally all about the US's culture of violence, specifically comparing how it approaches violence compared to Canada. Guns are surely an important symbol of that culture in the movie and society, but the documentary is a genuinely thoughtful take on the broader and more salient issue.
- 1123581321 14y agoYou would say that Moore has a bad reputation or has gotten a bad reputation. "Bad rep" is a derivation of "bad rap" or "bum rap" which both mean to be falsely charged with something - no one rightly gets one. I do agree that those interested in gun rights and gun violence will find BfC is worth watching.
- jarrett 14y agoTrue, and yet given that gun control is an important political battle of our time, data pertaining specifically to guns, not just violence in general, is important. (At least to the extent that data ever influences these kinds of public decisions.) Granted there are knee-jerk partisans on both sides of the issue. But thinking people would benefit from solid data. There are intelligent people who believe that defensive gun use almost never occurs, and then there are intelligent people who believe it's far more common than criminal gun use. They cannot both be right, but I believe intelligent people could be persuaded to the truth, if science could establish what the truth was. That being said, gun control cannot be decided by a science-based, cost-benefit analysis alone. That's because we have the 2nd Amendment. So it is not just a scientific question, but also one of constitutional law.
- csense 14y ago> Creating a system that allows scientists to gather that data might be objectionable to some people who own guns. Sampling is the answer. If the federal government is keeping really close tabs on 100% of non-criminal gun-related happenings, that's Orwellian supersurveillance. If a randomly selected 1% of gun sales or local police blotter entries or whatever are selected for a scientific study, that's a lot less invasive of gun owners' privacy while still giving scientists enough data to work with.
- reader5000 14y agoNot really. Gun ownership has externalities, just like car ownership. The government keeps "close tabs" on 100% of automobile related transactions, including licensing and insurance requirements. It's not Orwellian to force a consumer to fully realize the total cost to society of her consumption.
- 1123581321 14y agoIt's largely because the United States has as part of its constitution that citizens be armed. Even if guns are determined to be harmful, they're unlikely to go away. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of promising categories of research, including sociological and criminal areas, in which, if effective means of improvement are found, changes may actually be implemented. The more strident of a utilitarian (the school of thought that favors less violence versus following the Constitution) a researcher is, the more the researcher will pursue the avenue that will do the most good and avoid a principled death on the hill of gun ownership and proliferation.
- nazgulnarsil 14y ago>For instance, because of those differences in the definition of “defensive gun use” some researchers will tell you that Americans use a gun to defend themselves something like 1.5 million times every year. Others say it happens maybe 200,000 times annually. That kind of variability does not create an environment where it is easy to craft evidence-based policy fuck you, yes it clearly does, it just isn't the answer you want. Author has clearly written the bottom line first in this article. 20k deaths occur annually from gun violence discounting suicides. The lowest estimate for defensive uses of guns (which came from a study which only counted actual police reports) was the aforementioned 200k. This is an order of magnitude difference. Criminals in our country are going to have guns for a long time and no law is going to change that.
- ams6110 14y agoPresumably the 200K "defensive uses of guns" includes uses that didn't result in a death.
- adammil 14y agoI am extremely pro-science. However, I am angry about attempts to scientifically study gun ownership because I know the only reason is to try and violate my rights by restricting or banning ownership. It's just as offensive to me as a scientific study to decide if we should restrict or ban free speech. Unless you honestly think they undertake these studies to expand our firearm rights or strictly for scientific curiosity?
- gensym 14y agoI don't think "pro-science" means what you think it means.
- nazgulnarsil 14y agoHe's anti-scientism. Providing a scientific veneer of legitimacy to political claims. Are you claiming this doesn't happen all the time?
- gensym 14y agoNope. Being against scientific studies because what they uncover may lead to measures you dislike is not anti-scientism. It's anti-science. Science, done correctly, inconveniently disregards your values and preferences, so it's perfectly rational to oppose its use in certain situations, but doing so is absolutely anti-science.
- nazgulnarsil 14y agounless choice of hypothesis is a hell of a lot more impartial and rigorous and null-results and replications actually get reported on NO science is not value free.