When it comes to research, the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” applies.
You see, when you’re conducting a study, your findings are only going to be as good as the data you examine. If you fail to include certain things, you might well get erroneous findings that could well lead you to false conclusions.
And, really, that’s part of why so many anti-gun studies are worthless.
For example, we have a study here that compared the gun homicide rates of the United States, the UK, and Australia. Shockingly, they found that gun control was the solution to our problems.
In the study, investigators compared mental illness and gun violence between three countries — the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.
The United States has a rate of mental illness not much different than those of the U.K. or Australia, the researchers said.
Nearly 16% of Americans had some sort of mental illness in 2019, compared with about 18% in Australia and 14% in the U.K.
But in the first half of 2023, the United States had experienced about 21,000 gun homicides among a population of 335 million, compared to 225 murders among 26.4 million in Australia and about 200 killings among 67.7 million in the U.K.
“The U.S. is experiencing more than 10 times higher death rates from gun violence than Australia and more than 40 times higher death rates than the U.K.,” said researcher Dr. Charles Hennekens, a professor with the Florida Atlantic University Schmidt College of Medicine in Boca Raton.
What is different between the three countries is the number of firearms freely available, his team noted.
So they simply compared gun homicides and then concluded that the problem is that more guns are available here in the United States than elsewhere.
Again, if that’s the only data included, it’s not difficult to reach such a conclusion.
The problem is with what data they left out.
If the issue is, in fact, access to guns, then why is our non-gun homicide rate so much higher than the total homicide rate in the UK? In fact, our non-gun homicide rate is nearly twice Australia’s total homicide rate.
If this were simply about access to guns, one would imagine that our non-gun homicide rate would be at least similar to these other nations’ total murder rate. It’s not. It’s significantly higher, which means that we’d still have a homicide problem if there were no guns at all anywhere.
See, this study looks like a case of researchers knowing what they wanted to find and then only looking at data that confirmed their beliefs. Had they looked at things like our non-gun homicide rate and even passingly compared it to the total homicide rates of these two nations, they might have started to wonder if there’s something else going on here.
This study then pulled the state-to-state comparison on “gun deaths” and tried to make the same argument.
The problem is that either comparison, international or state-by-state, still has to control for a huge variety of other factors like economics, weather, education, and so on.
Again, this looks like a study specifically crafted to push the anti-gun line, which is pathetic since the homicide rates for the other nations are readily available on the internet. They don’t require fancy academic access, which means we can see just how full of it they really are.
We can also see how little the media cares to dig when presented with a “study” that says what they want it to say.
