Princeton University in a surprising stroke of honesty has done an extensive analysis and study of the actual rigor that “researchers” apply when doing studies. So much for “gun control” supporting “research” and “climate change”…
They gave a large number of them a set of data and asked them all to perform a study of it for publication. Since the media loves to take studies that purport to analyze “gun violence” (whatever that is) and heavily publicize it in the hope that the politicians will get the emotional boost that they need to pass more restrictive gun control laws, the NRA did an overview analysis of Princeton’s results.
The study itself is extensive and rather damning of the social “scientists” that participated. There were a large number that got involved. The net of this is that there was no reliable result from 73 experienced teams of social scientists that were all motivated to come up with the same result from the same data. Only one team did the initial analysis that rejected the data as inadequate for the work. The rest plodded through applying their individual biases and coming up with greatly varying results.
The study PDF is at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2203150119?download=true
It’s quite clear that everyone should question the validity of any “gun violence” research that is presented to the public. I know of only one researcher, John Lott, who regularly makes his raw datasets available to the public so that anyone can do their own analysis and confirmation of his work. Critics of his work don’t actually do that, but rather apply their own biases and theories as is clearly evident in the Princeton study. Lott is a trained economist, not a “social scientist” and he approaches his work from that factual point of view. The Left hates him for it and the factual truth he teases from the data.
The public and politicians should be very skeptical of the myriad studies criticizing civilian firearm ownership in the United States – and especially those that ignore the impact of criminals and criminal organized gangs in American cities. Here’s an example of how a taxpayer funded study at the CDC has recently been corrupted through agency and administration bias:
In this case, real data existed and was removed because it was inconvenient to the intended conclusion of the study. That is both corrupt and dishonest.
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