Research is important. It’s vital that we, as a people do all we can to understand the world around us.

However, research has a problem. It’s not trusted. The reason is that we’ve seen too many cases of researchers misbehaving.

So when I saw a group was formed to look at guns, I was nervous. Would this just be more gun control?

I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t be because I think we need some good research to look at things like violent crime so we can get a better understanding of it.

Unfortunately, this ain’t it.

The problem of gun violence in America can at times seem utterly intractable.

The horrific frequency of mass shootings (almost 300 in the first six months of 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive), the tragic daily toll of firearm-related deaths (124 per day on average, according to the CDC), and the inability of politicians to implement effective gun control measures have had devastating personal consequences for individuals and families and pose a significant public health challenge for the nation.

The CDC reports that firearm-related injuries rank among the five leading causes of death for people ages 1 to 44 and are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, killing more people ages 1 to 19 than car accidents, drug overdoses, or cancer.

But for epidemiologist and gun violence expert Charles Branas, PhD, the Gelman Professor of Epidemiology and chair of the Department of Epidemiology in the Mailman School of Public Health, the scope and recalcitrance of the problem only heighten the urgency of answering one basic question: “What do you do about it?”

In theory, this is fine.

In fact, through most of the piece, there weren’t any glaring red flags. There were some things that gave me pause, but they could also have been innocent mistakes.

But the truth is, this is a gun control effort just pretending to be about getting to the truth.

How do I know this?

Well, we have comments like this:

“There’s good evidence to show that especially in adolescents, the transition from contemplating suicide to action is very short-lived and transient and therefore utilizes whatever means are easily available,” Dr. Blanchard says.

The extraordinary lethality of guns means that someone who decides to commit suicide and has access to a firearm is much more likely to succeed than someone who does not. Research indicates that acts of suicide involving a firearm are fatal 90% of the time, compared with 13.5% for self-poisoning.

The problem here is that there are far more methods of attempting suicide than self-poisoning. In fact, a number of them have a damn near as high a lethality rate as firearms.

This follows a mention of red flag laws, which are often touted as being effective at preventing suicides.

However, that’s not always the case.

We have a study that’s a comparison of the results of red flag laws between Indiana and Connecticut. What did it find? Well, read for yourself:

Results:

Indiana’s firearm seizure law was associated with a 7.5% reduction in firearm suicides in the ten years following its enactment, an effect specific to suicides with firearms and larger than that seen in any comparison state by chance alone. Enactment of Connecticut’s law was associated with a 1.6% reduction in firearm suicides immediately after its passage and a 13.7% reduction in firearm suicides in the post–Virginia Tech period, when enforcement of the law substantially increased. Regression-based sensitivity analyses showed that these findings were robust to alternative specifications. Whereas Indiana demonstrated an aggregate decrease in suicides, Connecticut’s estimated reduction in firearm suicides was offset by increased nonfirearm suicides.

How did supposedly unbiased researchers miss this tidbit?

So yeah, I’m unconvinced this is going to be any different than the other efforts that have provided useless, garbage anti-gun studies designed specifically to push gun control that we’ve been dealing with for years now.

It’s not science, it’s gun control activism wearing scientific drag.

What these so-called researchers either don’t get or don’t care about is that they’re undermining the public’s trust in everything.

Research is supposed to be about finding the answers. If that is that gun control works, so be it, but I have yet to see any evidence that these supposed experts are doing anything but starting from a premise that it does and seeking validation for that belief.

That’s not science, it’s confirmation bias.