Harvard Study Shows No Effect Of Firearm Laws On Gun Deaths

TheGunMag ^ | 13 March, 2013 | Timothy Wheeler, MD

[marktwain]

Harvard medical researchers just published a scholarly paper in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, claiming that more firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of gun homicides and suicides. However, examination of their data and research methods shows the opposite.

McMaster University researcher Caillin Langmann, MD, PhD noted that the Harvard authors’ own best analysis:

* Does not show that states with more gun laws have fewer gun deaths

* Demonstrates that “assault weapon” bans have no effect on homicide

* Demonstrates that laws prohibiting guns in public places have no effect on homicide

Even more damning, Dr. Garen Wintemute, well known for research advocating gun control, agrees with Dr. Langmann. In his editor-invited commentary Wintemute faults the Harvard authors for relying on a state gun law grading system used by the Brady Center (formerly known as Handgun Control, Inc.) and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Both of these organizations are dedicated gun control advocates. Using their political ploy in a scientific journal is disgraceful.

It gets uglier. Intentionally or not, these authors tailored the data to favor the pro-gun control conclusions they wanted. In state rankings, the authors deleted New Hampshire, Vermont, and North Dakota, all states with low homicide rates and relatively few gun laws. By contrast, the District of Columbia is a jurisdiction with many gun laws and high gun homicide rates. According to Dr. Langmann, properly including D.C. in the calculation causes the average homicide rate in states with few gun laws to be much lower than the rate in states with more gun laws. The simple act of excluding D.C. from the analysis biases the results.

Glaringly absent from the paper is any mention of criminology research, which mostly happens to disagree with the Harvard authors. But none of the prominent criminologists specializing in this field were invited to comment on the article. And in keeping with the authors’ tendency to ignore findings refuting their message, they neglected to mention to the media a point crucial to current debate—their finding that assault weapons bans are not associated with homicide.

Further refutation of the Harvard study comes from none other than the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), no friend of gun owners. A CDC task force concluded that it could not find any evidence that gun control laws reduce violent crime.

The timing of the article’s publication is also suspect, just as Congress is considering gun control legislation. JAMA editors scandalously rushed into publication an article in 1999, right before President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial involving sexual misconduct, showing that college students didn’t consider oral sex to be “real sex.” JAMA editor George Lundberg was fired for having, in the words of AMA chief Dr. E. Ratcliffe Anderson, Jr., “threatened the historic tradition and integrity of the Journal of the American Medical Association by inappropriately and inexcusably interjecting JAMA into a major political debate that has nothing to do with science or medicine.”

The major political debate this spring is over gun control. This hopelessly flawed scientific paper should have been thoroughly red-penciled by JAMA Internal Medicine’s peer reviewers and rejected for publication. But instead they let it pass, and now gun-grabbing politicians see it as ammunition in their hands to help pass more gun control laws. Unfortunately for them, when brought out into the sunlight, the study becomes the exact opposite—a powerful affirmation that research shows no effect of gun laws on gun deaths.

Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.

[marktwain]

Gun control is not about decreasing crime or suicides. It is all about control of people that the statists dislike.

[edcoil]

So either Harvard is full of crap or, the book “More guns less Crime” is.

I am betting on the former, not the latter.

[mbarker12474]

Remember, the faculty at Harvard was outraged when their President declared that women are distinct from men.

[from occupied ga]

It is all about control of people that the statists dislike.

And that would be anyone who owns a gun.

[History Repeats]

Actually it’s anyone who does’t agree with them and help them turn America into a socialist third world country.

[Robert357]

OK, people need to rally and put pressure on the JAMA and its publications that they shall not and never be organs of propaganda.

“...The timing of the article’s publication is also suspect, just as Congress is considering gun control legislation. JAMA editors scandalously rushed into publication an article in 1999, right before President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial involving sexual misconduct, showing that college students didn’t consider oral sex to be “real sex.” JAMA editor George Lundberg was fired for having, in the words of AMA chief Dr. E. Ratcliffe Anderson, Jr., “threatened the historic tradition and integrity of the Journal of the American Medical Association by inappropriately and inexcusably interjecting JAMA into a major political debate that has nothing to do with science or medicine..”

It is time to unload on the JAMA and find out who its advertisers are and unload on them that they should not help sponsor “junk science and propaganda.”

This is a grass roots effort that really needs to start!

[Puppage]

Harvard medical researchers just published a scholarly paper....

And, that's as far as I need to go.

[indthkr]

2nd Amendment bump for later........

[11th Commandment]

When liberals are confronted with the facts, they have to acknowledge that banning assault riffles and high capacity magazines will do nothing to the murder rate. What the will say is that with lower power weapons, a mass shooter may not be able to get off as many shots resulting in fewer deaths. Although that doesn't have a significant impact on the Murder rate, it would save a few lives. And this alone in the liberal mind is enough to ban assault riffle and high capacity magazines.

However, this thinking has no basis in economic reality. The lesson in crime prevention that the US as learned over the last 20 years is that crime has little to do with poverty control but removing criminals from the street. Understanding this, the US put time and resources into local police and removed the criminal element. This was the successful experiment in NYC under Rudy G and implemented all over the country. Today the US has 300,000 more uniform officers than it did 20 years ago.

By imposing criminal law of gun ownership we will have divert police resources from "walking the beat" to enforcing guns laws on law abiding citizens. We know the former is an effective crime fighting tool while the latter is not. Furthermore diverting resources to enforce guns laws will invariably increase crime as we have less cops putting the real criminals behind bars. So the question to ask, is possibly saving 4-5 lives in a mass shooting every few years worth the cost of an appreciably increased murder rate year after year.

Liberals are capable of answering this question. Ironically, the resource argument is the same reasoning many liberals use to justify marijuana decriminalization.