Thursday, January 24, 2013

Shutting Down Scientific Research

David Frum of the Daily Beast

End the congressional ban upon studies of gun safety, urge 100 scientists from major universities.

While mortality rates from almost every major cause of death declined dramatically over the past half century, the homicide rate in America today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1950," the academics wrote in a letter organized by scholars at the University of Chicago Crime Lab research center.

"Politically-motivated constraints" left the nation "muddling through" a problem that costs American society on the order of $100 billion per year, it said. The federal Centers for Disease Control has cut firearms safety research by 96 percent since the mid-1990s, according to one estimate. Congress, pushed by the gun lobby, in 1996 put restrictions on CDC funding of gun research into the budget. Restrictions on other agencies were added in later years.

Just as a general rule: if you're the side shutting down scientific investigation, then you're the side that's in the wrong.

12 comments:

  1. The NRA is desperate to prevent its gunsuck followers from learning the truth:

    1) The most dangerous person in America is someone in your own house with a firearm

    2) Houses with guns and teens have hugely larger numbers of suicides and homicides.

    3) Gunsucks with children have a huge increase in dead and maimed children.

    The NRA is interested in one thing and one thing only - selling guns.

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    1. Kellermann study again? So if I look at two small areas, I can draw broad conclusions about a whole population?

      But hey, at least the guy who tosses out the word, gunsuck, is coming out into the open.

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    2. Ad hominem attacks render your opinions irrelevant.

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    3. On the contrary, Rev., in spite of the mildly offensive name calling, Nick makes good points and you know it.

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    4. I guess I'd better get my money back. My guns aren't living up to their promises.

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  2. Guns are different from the flu or climate change or the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. Guns draw in moral questions and questions of basic rights.

    I'm not against research as such. What concerns me is the inevitable push to use the data to take away rights. If we knew that your side wouldn't do that, we'd have no fundamental objection to studies.

    Affording them right now is another question. In that regard, we have more important things to look into.

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    1. Greg, I'm surprised you don't take the more aggressive approach and insist that any research would prove your side is right. Instead, the best you can come up with is we have more important things to look into. Hahahahaha.

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    2. Mikeb, unlike you, I don't determine the outcome before the study is done.

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  3. You're right, "nick".

    Let's also not forget, all those clearly-negative results from literally every statistical measure published in peer-reviewed scientific and health journals makes the gun lobby look pretty bad. And the death of innocents is pretty inconvenient for their "more guns everywhere" argument.

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    1. There are 300,000,000+ guns in the hands of about 100,000,000 Americans. If these studies were correct, we'd all be dead. Or perhaps the danger is so tiny as to be negligible. Either way, I'll keep my guns, thanks.

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    2. Actually, Greg, there are around 370,000 violent gun crimes a year (around 31,000 deadly, another 337,960 non-fatal, including 70,000 injuries), and that doesn't even include "non-violent" gun crimes like gun thefts or felons in possession.

      370K / 100M = about 1 in 250 gun owners commits a violent crime each year.

      Not the best numbers, Greg, if you look beyond just the fatal incidents.

      http://www.kcby.com/news/va?vaid=bcc49ddc3a58367040b3e3c05e8f5059

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    3. Thanks for those numbers, Baldr. Greg and the others love to compare ALL of something to SOME of another thing.

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