Slander as Science: Public Health’s Vicious Attack on Gun Owners

By Timothy Wheeler, MD

Public health gun prohibitionists have been down on their luck for a very long time now. It is true that they can claim some advances in gun control policy in the bluest states, and the Obama administration’s regulators continue to hungrily eat out the substance of the Second Amendment. But gun rights policy, bolstered as it must be by public opinion, is tending steadily toward firearms freedom. And the medical gun grabbers are becoming desperate.

Partisans of gun control, a passionate lot, are showing a level of frustration that has always been present in some less civilized public forums. But now it’s spilling over into the previously ordered world of academia. The results are ugly—nasty libel quite unlike anything seen before in a scientific journal. If the ongoing public health smear of guns as “a virus that must be eradicated” is no longer getting traction with policy makers, the backup plan seems to be to denounce gun owners as racists. And as always, if supporting evidence is lacking, fabrications will serve just as well.

The American Journal of Public Health is the official journal of public health in America. In its online version, published ahead of print December 12, 2014, two Vanderbilt University public health scholars engage in a loosely structured exploration, “Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms”. Be warned that any article in an academic journal that includes words like “gun violence”, “narrative”, and “hegemonic White male individualism”, is already suspect. The authors confirm those suspicions and resolve beyond a doubt that this article, despite supposed peer review, is a dressed-up diatribe against gun ownership. Gun owners, the authors strongly imply over and over, tend to be angry, paranoid white males who are indisputably racist.

A peer-reviewed scientific journal is presumed to require strict experimental standards. Authors whose work is accepted for publication are supposed to stick to widely accepted methods of data collection and analysis. In this case the authors quickly dispense with such formalities, admitting they relied on “important secondary sources”. Out of 118 literature citations supporting their claims, 25 were from zealously anti-gun rights media outlets the New York Times, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and Mother Jones.

Here are a few outrageously unsubstantiated claims made by the two presumably objective authors:

“Anxieties about insanity and gun violence are also imbued with oft-unspoken anxieties about race, politics, and the unequal distribution of violence in US society.”

But how can these authors make such a claim if the supposed anxieties are “unspoken”? Are they clairvoyant?

“…seemingly self-evident images of the mentally disturbed, gun-obsessed, White male loner or the individually pathologized White male brain are also relatively recent phenomena. Critics hold that this framing plays off of rhetoric about hegemonic White male individualism and privilege that ultimately reinforce wider arguments for gun rights.”

This is a weird side trip into the minds of these authors that tells more about their fantasies and prejudices than it does about mental illness and firearm crimes.

“Persons in the United States live in an era that has seen an unprecedented proliferation of gun rights and gun crimes…”

The authors are half right—gun rights have been affirmed more than ever. But gun crimes have decreased for years, a glaring fact that undercuts their message that more guns mean more hegemonic angry paranoid White male gun violence.

But the American Journal of Public Health looks like a tool of the gun lobby compared to something called PLOS | One, an online, open-access scientific journal that apparently subscribes to the hip notion that all data must be free and uncensored. Like the American Journal of Public Health, it claims to be peer-reviewed, but its free-wheeling editorial policy apparently welcomes bigots and hoplophobes with open arms.

In the October 13, 2013 edition of PLOS | One two behavioral scientists from the United Kingdom and one from Australia published “Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions”. Apparently observing those gun-crazy Yankees from abroad allows more latitude to libel them, judging from this article. Some excerpts:

“For instance [here the authors explain how racial bias works in the U.S.], measures of explicit and implicit racism measures [sic] predicted opposition to Obama’s health reforms.”

So not only is gun ownership racist, opposition to Obamacare is racist as well.

“This study investigated whether racism is related to gun ownership and opposition to gun control in US whites. We hypothesized that, after accounting for known confounders (i.e., age, gender, education, income, location, conservatism, political identification, anti-government sentiment), anti-black racism would be associated with having a gun in the home, and opposition to gun controls.”

You can guess what their conclusions were.

“There is some experimental research showing that participants who have recently held a firearm produce enhanced salivary testosterone levels and display increased aggression toward others. Causality aside, greater control of firearms is the most logical direction for public health policy.”

This novel finding doesn’t seem to have made its way into the mainstream literature on firearm crime, perhaps because it’s a crazy notion crafted to support the phobic view of firearms—the gun itself is the cause of firearm crime.

“Attitudes towards guns in many US whites appear to be influenced, like other policy preferences, by illogical racial bias. The present results suggest that gun control policies may need to be implemented independent of public opinion.”

So the science clearly shows that because gun owners are racists, we can ignore their contribution to democratic government and violate their civil rights freely.

How do these scientists (I hesitate to use that term—propagandists is more accurate) prove racism? Have they documented race-based bad behavior, or even racist speech from these “US whites”? No, incredibly they say they rely on a concept they call symbolic racism. Symbolic racism is what you accuse people of when you can’t find any real fault with their behavior but you still aim to demonize them. It is the same level of evidence once used to condemn witches in Salem.

If proof is needed that the public health community has no intention of treating the subject of firearms fairly, these two examples should suffice. In the past, public health academics tried to maintain a façade of objectivity. But as public opinion has tended steadily toward affirming gun rights, they have abandoned that pretense.
When “experts” claim that firearms are a public health menace and offer more gun control as the universal cure, let’s remember that their methods discredit them from the start. Slander is not the same as scientific research. It’s clear which road the public health community has taken.

 

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

All DRGO articles by Timothy Wheeler, MD.