There is much speculation about how to identify people at risk of committing violence, in order to preempt their possessing firearms. This ignores risks from violence done with, say, hands and knives, but it’s a worthy goal. However, it’s not one easily accomplished—and risks restricting Second Amendment rights from too many people who don’t present any risk at all. The stereotypical characteristics of a mass shooter are being almost always male and usually white (but whites and African-A...

[Editor's Note: The following article from Dr. Miguel Faria critiquing the below referenced Hemenway et al paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine was recently published at haciendapub.com and is republished here with the author's permission.] Ecologic studies are notorious for inherent errors of methodology, confounding variables, and magnifying other sample biases intrinsic to fault-prone, population-based epidemiological studies. But in the paper, “Firearm Ownership and Vi...

As a former Navy surgeon, I am both heartbroken and angered by the evil murders of four of our Marines and one sailor (Gunnery Sgt. Thomas J. Sullivan, Staff Sgt. David A. Wyatt, Sgt. Carson A. Holmquist, Lance Cpl. Squire K. "Skip" Wells and Petty Officer 2nd Class Randall Scott Smith) in Chattanooga, Tennessee on July 16, 2015 at the hands of an Islamic terrorist. Of course, the Recruiting Center and Reserve Center where they were murdered are "gun free zones" by regulation. In response...

From the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) this week comes bad news for President Obama and the big gun control push he has chosen to be the faltering finale of his domestic agenda. But it’s no surprise to anyone who knows anything about those responsible gun owners who legally carry a firearm for self-protection. In the typically meticulous and granular detail criminologist John Lott is famous for, Lott and his CPRC researchers determined in a 2014 report the number of concealed ca...

An all too common bit of conventional wisdom is that children and guns don’t mix. In this view, no good can come from kids learning anything about how guns work, the rules of gun safety (other than terrified avoidance), or shooting sports. This has never been true, and now it seems children are being allowed, even encouraged, to pursue shooting sports more than ever, along with being caught tennis and it could be as easy as watching a tennis serve video to learn about tennis. Youtube is a gr...

The outraged media partisans might as well have led with the headline “House Speaker Boehner wants more African-Americans to die of gun violence”. Stories in Business Insider and PRI led with a paragraph all but accusing Congress of deliberately risking another massacre of black churchgoers by recently continuing its long-standing ban on federal funding of gun control advocacy at the Centers for Disease Control. These were supposedly straight news stories, not editorials. And I have no do...

Science is supposed to be objective and data-based. Unfortunately, findings aren’t always fact-based and can be skewed, intentionally or not. Premises, like their conclusions, may be questionable. What is the risk that reports that dazzle with brilliance disguise attempts to baffle with bull----? Pretty high, when they come from gun control advocates. Some examples: (more…)

Americans, owing to their freedom-seeking history, are less comfortable than most people with giving government a hand in managing their private lives. Perhaps that’s why the international panel of editors of the BMJ (British Medical Journal)-owned journal Injury Prevention saw no problem with helping some New York City and Boston anti-gun advocacy researchers hype a new meme—attacking the very culture of American gun owners. It’s not really a new technique. Public health gun prohibitioni...