Almost universally, gun research tends to reach conclusions that support what gun control advocates support. Now, there are a few possible reasons for that, which include self-censoring and an anti-gun bias, but the fact that there's almost no deviation from that is troubling, to say the least. Statistically speaking, at least some studies should have accidentally reached what might be termed as pro-gun findings.

They haven't, with a few notable exceptions.

Georgetown's William English has been at the center of controversy. Why? He published a study that found how often guns are used in self-defense.

An op-ed out of the Twin Cities, written by a gentleman named F.D. Flam, seeks to question that study and just how often guns are used in self-defense as a whole.

In the precedent-reversing 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, which struck down longstanding restriction on who could carry a handgun in New York, justices cited an unpublished survey that seemed to show guns are used well over a million times a year in self-defense. That survey, by Georgetown University researcher William English, was paid for by the gun lobby, according to reporting by the New York Times, who also picked apart his research methods. English responded in a WSJ op-ed, arguing that he’d not hidden his funding sources — they were declared in all his published work.

Ever notice how English is being attacked for where his funding comes from, but any supposed research published by Everytown is taken as gospel truth? Everytown for Gun Safety is a gun control advocacy organization, no different than the NRA or other gun rights groups. Why is it that their funding of research doesn't seem to bother people like Flam while English's research does?

Then we've got his peers jumping in on the fun.

Stanford University law professor John Donohue said in the 35 years he’s been doing gun research, he’s never seen any work by English that met “what I consider to be the relatively low standards it takes to get something published.”

Considering the crap that routinely gets published, one could take that as a compliment.

So far as I can tell, part of those "relatively low standards" is pushing the anti-gun narrative. English's research doesn't do that, ergo, it doesn't meet the standards.

Yet let's also remember, again, that findings like his are incredibly rare. Improbably so, even. We can't even get a firm determination on whether or not eggs are good for you, with studies swinging back and forth over the years, and yet damn near every gun study finds guns are bad? Then the one example of a study saying otherwise is suddenly the bad one?

Yeah, sorry. I'm not buying it.

English's research isn't all that different from others. He used a survey to ask a question and then reported those findings. We've seen countless studies cited breathlessly by the media using basically these same methods. They're not ideal, but in a lot of cases, we don't really have a better way to look at things.

The issue is that here, it's a problem.

Part of the reason English found so many defensive uses of guns is that he allowed survey respondents to define “self-defense” for themselves. When I asked him about the 1.67 million number, he said in only 300,000 of those cases was a shot likely fired. He estimated that in 852,000 times the gun was only brandished, and in about 518,000 times neither happened — e.g. someone may have said they had a gun to intimidate the other party.

But David Hemenway, a professor of public health at Harvard, says it can be a problem to define self-defense so broadly. Hemenway has also done surveys asking people about their defensive use of guns, and he says most are not defending themselves against a mugger or a rapist. They are more like the subject who told Hemenway he went and got his gun after arguing with a neighbor who threw a beer. Or the guy who said that the alarm at his business went off, so he went down to the site, saw people standing outside on the sidewalk, and shot the ground. Or two groups of young men who exchanged gunfire at a gas station at 3 a.m. Should any of these cases really be considered self-defense?

There's no link to Hemenway's work on the subject so we can evaluate it ourselves, but his anti-gun bias is extremely well known already. The NRA-ILA addressed it on their site back in 2023. As such, one must at least question the validity of his anecdotes.

Further, even if it were true, that anecdote isn't data. It's one story out of how many? It's unlikely he spoke with hundreds of thousands of individuals and got their stories, then evaluated them as to whether they were truly self-defense or not.

Now, I won't say that simply allowing people to determine if they acted in self-defense or not is the best idea. I can easily see people misrepresenting their mistaken actions, effectively skewing the results. Yet on the same token, there's nothing wrong with counting defensive gun uses where the round isn't fired. We've covered numerous stories through the years of exactly that happening. These are people who would have been the victim of a violent crime had they been disarmed. 

Yet if you somehow limit it to just those who fire a weapon, you're ignoring a lot of defensive gun uses.

I get that Hemenway and his buddies are probably more than fine with that since every defensive gun use undermines his own position on the issue of firearms, but that doesn't change the harsh reality of acts of self-defense.

The truth of the matter is that English is under attack primarily because he refused to bow down to the altar of gun control and either self-censor or change his findings to fit academia's preferred narrative. I'm not saying his work is above being questioned, but question it in a manner that makes some kind of sense instead of this idea of "he was paid by the wrong people"... especially when we could make the same argument for the vast majority of "research" produced by anti-gun-funded academics. 

Sorry, but again, I'm not buying it.