The Republican Fear of Facts on Guns

[benEzra]

3. The "fear of facts on guns" is mostly on the gun-control-advocacy side, in my observation.

I have yet to see any acknowledgement from the gun control side that their top legislative priority for a quarter-century----namely, the war on "assault weapons"----targets the least misused class of guns in America (yet the most popular rifles in U.S. homes), and their war on vetted carry-license holders targets the most responsible owners.

I also don't see much acknowledgement that the U.S. gun violence rate has fallen by half since 1991 or so, and is lower than it has been since the 1950's or 1960's, coincident with much higher ownership rates, much greater CCW licensure, and the dramatic shift toward small-caliber semiauto rifles in lieu of lever-actions and larger-caliber bolt-actions.

A lot of good Federally funded gun violence research is done, and funded, by experts in the field (that's what criminologists study). The "research" that led to the Federal funding restriction was junk-science "advocacy papers" written mostly by people writing outside their field of expertise, subject to little or no peer review, and full of egregious factual or logical blunders (e.g. the paper in J. Trauma that said that low-velocity bullets have higher velocity than high-velocity bullets, or the Kellerman et al papers in JAMA). But those aren't where you'd go for good data anyway.

Even the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, and the Law Enforcement Killed and Assaulted reports, are treasure troves of good information that are studiously ignored by gun-prohibition advocates, because they undermine their fearmongering.