> Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I always like to see this. I've always viewed

> Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I always like to see this. I've always viewed arms possession as a civil right, and I sense that there is something of a paradigm shift in that direction happening. > to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful Part of the problem is that data is extremely hard to come by anything resembling unbiased data on the topic. One of my personal pet peeves is when someone writes about "10,000 kids are murdered in gun violence every year", only to find upon further investigation that for the dataset they used, "kids" refers to all persons age 25 and under and "murdered" really meant "killed by". Counting a 24-year-old gang member who is shot by police as a "child murdered by gun violence" is absurd. I'm not familiar with any similar criticisms going the other direction. The closest thing I've seen would be a handful of academics dismissing the work of John Lott out-of-hand without giving a specific reason for doing so. Asserting that a peer-reviewed paper is "widely discredited" has no meaning when one cannot point to a single published criticism of the work.