Part of the reason I can't just blindly trust The Science (TM) is that science is a lot more complicated than many people want to believe. It's messy, where one set of experiments tell us one thing and another set tells us something completely different.

Many of us are still confused about whether eggs are bad for us or not despite numerous studies. One one tells you they are and another says otherwise, it's hard not to be confused.

So studies don't always get to the truth. Sometimes, in fact, they suggest some pretty bizarre stuff, such as this one that tries to link hunting with violent crime.

In what may be the most poorly conceived and horribly researched study ever published by The Journal of the American Medical Association during its entire 141-year history, a trio of anti-gun researchers now claims deer hunting is associated with a substantial increase in firearm violence. 

...

The report, “Deer Hunting Season and Firearm Violence in US Rural Counties,” which was released Wednesday, was written by Patrick Sharkey, PhD; Juan Camilo Cristancho, BA, and Daniel Semenza, PhD. 

Sharkey is affiliated with Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Cristancho works at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, and Semenza is affiliated with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University. 

The researchers sought to investigate “the association between the start of deer hunting season and shootings in rural counties of the US.” 

They compared shootings during the first three weeks of deer season to a week prior to the season opener. The authors claim there was a “substantial increase in shootings” during the start of deer season, which they said calls for additional gun control, of course. 

“The findings highlight the role of firearm prevalence in gun violence and suggest the need for focused policies designed to reduce firearm violence in areas with substantial hunting activity during the first weeks of deer hunting season,” the report states. 

The report relies on evidence from the Gun Violence Archive, which they admit has a bias toward incidents that gain more media reporting than others, but they pushed through anyway.

Now, what about the research itself?

Well, we first need to understand that correlation isn't causation, of course, but then we need to go even beyond that and ask if there are any other reasons for shootings to tick upward during those first three weeks of deer season. Or do we?

Check this out from the results portion study in question (link above):

Figure 2 displays results from models focusing on total shootings for the 854 rural counties (mean [SD] population, 16 416 [18 329] per county; 5.4 [13.3] annual shootings per 100 000 people) in our analytical sample. Of the 854 counties in the sample, 305 had at least 1 shooting during the study period. 

854 counties in total, and at least 305 had at least one shooting.

While there isn't any mention of the total number of shootings reported, it seems pretty clear that we're not talking about all that many. 

The rates are given in a per capita rate, which is the norm for trying to look at data and standardizing for population, but there's a downside, at least for smaller populations. A single incident creates a disparity that looks much worse on a per capita basis.

For example, a town with 500 people has a murder one year. For that year, they've got a homicide rate of 200, which is ridiculous, but it was just a single incident in a small population.

Hunting tends to happen in rural areas for obvious reasons. That means we're seeing an uptick that is barely noticeable on the ground simply because the incidents are actually small in number. Yet these researchers--who have a profound bias based on their other activities noted at the original link--have made it look like there's some massive epidemic.

Further, there's no differentiation between criminal shootings and defensive gun use. The first week of deer season may well uncover poachers who take a shoot at someone, but who in turn might get shot. Or maybe the poachers hit their target. Either way, you're looking at something that isn't because of hunting necessarily but due to criminal activity that just becomes uncovered because of hunting season.

These researchers didn't bother to look at or even consider any such thing. Most likely because they didn't care.