Posted on 01/09/2025 5:07:32 AM PST by marktwain
A paper published in the Psychology of Violence is interesting because of what it did not find.
The paper did not find any correlation between legally carrying a gun and four psychopathic measures. The four facets are “affective” (lack of empathy), “interpersonal” (manipulative), “lifestyle” (impulsive), and “antisocial”. “Carry a weapon sometimes for protection” is defined in the four measures as “antisocial.” When carrying a gun for protection is defined as “antisocial,” it is unsurprising the paper found a correlation between illegally carrying a gun and the antisocial trait. This is an example of circular reasoning.
The paper is titled Psychopathy, Gun Carrying, and Firearm Violence. It was published by the American Psychological Association (APA) in the publication Psychology of Violence. It was published for the first time online on August 22, 2024. The authors are Sophie L. Kjærvik and Nicholas D. Thomson. The paper is seven pages long.
The paper did not measure any actual criminal or violent incidents. The researchers recruited a group of adults at an urban hospital in Virginia. The adults were in the emergency room or the hospital because of injuries inflicted on them by violence from other individuals. There were 343 participants. 53% had gunshot wounds. 38% were victims of an assault. 9% had a stab wound. 254 of the participants were men. All the participants were 18-75 years old. The participants identified themselves as 65% black, and 12% white. The rest, 23%, were classified as “other”. Prisoners and minors were not recruited.
The participants were paid $160 to complete questionnaires for the study.
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
Not close to a representative sample. Even with this severe selection bias, no correlation was found between carrying a a gun and psychopathy.
I can find correlation to every one of the four traits studied in our elected officials and government bureaucrats. Funny that isn’t mentioned in the study. It’s purely Bovine Excrement. F’ing “experts” again. Clown world.
Then, I must be a psychopath.
bump
Talk about an extremely biased population sample. They do this to get the results they want and then usually try to extrapolate the results to the general population.
Per the article:
“The researchers recruited a group of adults at an urban hospital in Virginia. The adults were in the emergency room or the hospital because of injuries inflicted on them by violence from other individuals.
There were 343 participants. 53% had gunshot wounds. 38% were victims of an assault. 9% had a stab wound. 254 of the participants were men. All the participants were 18-75 years old.
The participants identified themselves as 65% black, and 12% white. The rest, 23%, were classified as “other”. “
Do you think that if you were the victim of a gunshot (53% in the sample), you might be a little bit biased?
Yes, that is one of the main points of the article.
The article also points out the inappropriate definitions used in the paper.
Junk science. Obviously the objective of the fake study is to discourage concealed carry. Criminals are psychopaths. A criminal who carries an illegal gun will likely be involved in a self defense shooting. Well, duh? Normal people hardly ever shoot anybody.
I’ve taken several graduate courses in designing and performing psychological research.
This paper broke so many rules that it never should have been published.
The vast majority of papers claiming to research the effects of firearms in the medical literature are junk.
This one may be the most poorly designed.
The authors deserve credit for publishing the results. The results discredited the authors thesis in spite of the poor design.
Any study relying on survey data is worthless.
A GREAT read is ‘Gun Curious’ by David Yamane. He reviews studies like this and eviscerates them. The book is a must read by all 2A enthusiasts.
The results of the study are a cause for hope.
In spite of all the selection bias, the people who carried firearms for defense did not contain a detectable number of psychopaths.
I interpret this to mean allmost all people carrying firearms for defense are doing so from a rational perspective based on their assessment of risk/benefit.
This is the premise of John Lott’s thesis: More Guns Less Crime.
As a corollary, as more minorities in high crime areas legally carry weapons for self defense, John Lott’s finding of a decrease in violent crime should be vindicated.
The “weapons theory of crime” is discredited.
More guns do not cause more crime.
“The paper found carrying a gun, both legally and illegally, was correlated to firing a gun in self-defense. Carrying a gun illegally was more strongly correlated to firing a gun in self-defense. There’s a helluva lot of “correlated” in that verbiage. More strongly correlated.
There were previous studies that started with people killed by gunfire, that then worked backwards from there. Talk about selection bias!
It’s hard to fire a gun in self-defense if you don’t have a gun: you have to first take it away from the person threatening you, or from an open-carrying passerby helpfully right there when you need them.
John Lott’s studies and book are a statistical validation of the commonsense philosophy as stated by Cesare Beccaria in “On Crimes and Punishments” in 1764.
“The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.4”
Beccaria’s work was in line with Natural Law and the enlightenment thinking at the time.
“Any study relying on survey data is worthless.”
They are not worthless, they just lack scientific objectivity. They do provide valuable information.
They can show patterns and correlations, but not “Cause and Effect.”
One of my degrees is in psychology. The psychology professors and textbooks keep telling the students that “psychology is a science.” I disagreed as it is impossible to remove the biased variable of perception from any study. As such, virtually all psychological studies lack credibility.
This was true until I developed a new methodology that stimulated the stored memories in a person’s soul many feet from their physical body and generated a movement response in the person. This is done even though the person is not physically touched, their eyes are closed, nothing is spoken, and no taste of smell stimulus. This method of bypassing the physical body senses allowed for bypassing a person’s critical mind and thus eliminated the biased variable of perception. This methodology makes psychology a science as it allows for a direct stimulus of consciousness that generates a measurable physical body response, and is repeatable. It does to human consciousness what X-rays do to bones. It is pure stimulus-measurable response.
The responses are unique for each person based upon how their life experiences programmed their personality and perceptions. It often knocks a person off their feet from many feet away, it is that powerful.
My focus has been more on neuroscience and the interaction of consciousness in the soul field around the physical body, with the physical body through the peripheral and central nervous system.
Most of the gun related studies are what I refer to as “Push Studies.” They are performed to sell the opinions of the person’s conducting the survey, i.e. “All guns are bad.”
I submit that anyone who murders someone or even wants to murder someone has serious mental health problems.
These people shouldn’t have firearms, of course, but keeping firearms away from these people is tough to do.
Correlation ≠ Causation
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