Uh, a person speaking on CNN, I think they said he was a rep of the NRA, claimed that Slate published a piece on a...
Uh, a person speaking on CNN, I think they said he was a rep of the NRA, claimed that Slate published a piece on a CDC study done under an Obama executive order that showed that increased gun ownership led to decreased (mass) shootings? I must have misheard some part of that, because I can't find anything even remotely like that. And he wouldn't respond to the interviewer repeatedly saying, yes, but Congress prevented the CDC from doing gun research, so what research are you referencing? He just kept saying there was an executive order. I'm quite confused.
Of course, it's just that I wanted to read it, if any such thing existed. Plus, he gave the impression of truly believing what he was saying. Which does not negate the possibility of total delusion and/or lying.
ReplyDeleteI hear that kind of claim infrequently, but it does seem to be out there as a concept.
ReplyDeleteBut I've never seen such a study, and I've looked, too. You'd expect that if it were real, from any reputable source, it would be trumpeted with great enthusiasm.
Simonetti et al. had an interesting 2015 analysis, where they tried to see if there was a connection between emergency room visits for firearms-related injuries and strictness of gun laws [1]. (The idea was to try to remove the impact of improved trauma care on numbers of murders, since it doesn't count as murder if the docs save your life, and trauma medicine has improved dramatically over the last twenty years.) My main take home from reading the paper is that it's hard to do these kinds of studies in the absence of systematic, national-scale data collection. Otherwise one is left trying to piece together conclusions from limited datasets and with limited resources.
ReplyDeleteWhat you need is an organization with national reach and deep epidemiological expertise to investigate these kinds of questions in a depth sufficient to come up with meaningful results. You know, like the CDC. Which, as is pointed out, is specifically not allowed to do that.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504301/