Scientific Censorship and Garbage Gun Studies
By Tom Knighton | 6:30 PM on December 27, 2023
A while back, Cam wrote about a Bloomberg columnist that talked about why gun control studies are worthless. He talked about a discussion in a video at Reason talking about these gun studies.
However, there was something at Reason that Cam didn’t touch on that I’d like to highlight, even though this video came out over a year and a half ago.
It’s this:
In terms of the gun control studies deemed rigorous by RAND, this means that even if there were no relationship between gun laws and violence—much like the relationship between drinking milk and getting into car accidents—we’d nevertheless expect about five percent of the studies’ 722 tests, or 36 results, to show that gun regulations had a significant impact. But the actual papers found positive results for only 18 combinations of gun control measure and outcome (such as waiting periods and gun suicides). That’s not directly comparable to the 36 expected false positives, since some combinations had the support of multiple studies. But it’s not out of line with what we would expect if gun control measures made no difference.
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/12/27/censors-gun-studies-n78777
