Dr. John Lott’s newest piece at Townhall.com discusses the House Appropriations Committee Allotting $50 million for public health research on guns. Lott’s piece begins this way:
…One of the most common attacks on the National Rifle Association is that it supposedly prevents academics from doing research on firearms. “[Academics] were forced to stop their work at the point of a gun—or at least at the insistence of National Rifle Association,” wrote the Washington Post of the 1996 Dickey Amendment.
Dr. John Lott appeared yesterday before the House Appropriations Committee to testify about the need for the CDC to fund research on gun ownership. He has a new piece at Fox News that starts this way:
…Democrats in the U.S. House are likely to approve spending $50 million in taxpayer funds for public health research on gun violence.
People often link to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center page on Homicide as evidence to prove that gun ownership is a negative. If guns are on a net negative on safety, how come every single place that has banned guns (all guns or all handguns) has seen an increase in murder/homicides?…
Siegel, Xuan, Ross, Galea, Kalesan, Fleegler, and Goss have a paper in the American Journal of Public Health that claims to be the first paper to find a statistically significant increase in homicides from the passage of right-to-carry laws.
The bottom line is that even accepting the regressions that the Siegel at all ran, they didn’t calculate their levels of statistical significance properly.
A new very short report from a few people at the Harvard Business School claims that waiting periods reduce homicides, though they find that there is no consistent effect on suicides. The report is titled “Handgun waiting periods reduce gun deaths,” and it was released by the National Academy of Sciences. …
Results: Compared with the 2 weeks before, postshow firearm injury rates remained stable in regions near California gun shows but increased from 0.67 injuries (95% CI, 0.55 to 0.80 injuries) to 1.14 injuries (CI, 0.97 to 1.30 injuries) per 100 000 persons in regions near Nevada shows.
Dr. John Lott appeared on the Larry Elder Show to discuss Public Health research on Police Deaths and Gun Ownership Rates. Lott’s book, The War on Guns, shows that when this data accounts for national changes in crime rates the higher gun ownership rates in a state are actually associated with lower rates of police being killed on the job.…
Problems with Public Health Research, Survey on gun ownership
John Lott’s newest piece at Fox News is on the extremely low quality of research by public health researchers starts this way:
…Academic advocates of gun control apparently need to manipulate the data in order to argue for background checks on private gun transfers. Even the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet, does not seem to be above publishing junk science on gun control.
background checks, op-ed, Problems with Public Health Research
John Lott’s op-ed at the Washington Post starts this way:
…Ballistic fingerprinting was all the rage 15 years ago. Maryland led the way, setting up a computer database on new guns and the markings they made on bullets. New York soon followed. The days of criminal gun use were supposedly numbered.
gun registration, op-ed, Problems with Public Health Research
