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...

Have you had the experience of going to your doctor for a particular problem, let’s say headaches, and been surprised by the doctor asking you about a completely unrelated subject—whether you have a gun in your home? It’s no accident that doctors’ or health plans’ questions about guns in your home have become routine. In the 1980s and 1990s medical professional organizations declared a culture war on gun ownership in America. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) developed an official poli...

The horror of a delusional murderer suddenly killing 9 people who had welcomed him into their Bible study the evening of June 17 is unimaginable. The misuse of this tragedy to beat the drums of commentators’ biases and agendas is all too recognizable. Those good, doomed people of Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina seem to have been among the best humanity offers. Some of them, including their overworked pastor, stayed late to hold their regular Bible study. An awkward, perha...

Memories are short. The constant flood of global news pouring from the internet, blessing though it may be, hasn’t helped the public sort the gold from the garbage. Let’s remember all the way back to last week, when numerous news outlets gave the Violence Policy Center (VPC) some entirely undeserved coverage for disinterring and dusting off a manufactured controversy about defensive gun uses (DGUs) that was laid to rest eighteen years ago. If today’s fresh-faced reporters knew anything ab...

A couple of weeks ago, a heartfelt academic liberal relative got curious about my writing on gun issues. He asked some meaningful questions when he realized that maybe the answers he’d always heard weren’t the whole story. I thought I’d share our exchanges, since they touch on many mistaken ideas about firearms, their meaning and our right to them. Let’s call him Hal: (more…)

The strategy of public health gun prohibitionists has long been to convince Americans that guns are “dirty, deadly, and banned”, as former Centers for Disease Control official Mark Rosenberg once said. We have yet another example of advocacy research toward this goal with a new article in Preventive Medicine from University of California-Davis anti-gun researcher Garen Wintemute. His article “Alcohol Misuse, Firearm Violence Perpetration, and Public Policy in the United States” aims to provi...