We've seen the state of gun research in this country. It's an absolute laughingstock, or it would be if there was an ounce of intellectual integrity anywhere in the science community.

Social science research is always going to be a little bit wonky, in part because experiments are difficult to impossible to conduct. However, that just makes it that much more important to get what research options that remain open to you right. Yet with gun research, not only does that not happen, but those who screw it up are celebrated.

Meanwhile, one researcher got a finding that his field disagreed with and he's being crucified.

For example, William English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, has been subpoenaed, attacked in The New York Times and accused of all sorts of breaches of professional conduct because he had the temerity to administer a huge survey on defensive gun use that was honest.

They are persecuting English in order to, as he put it in The Wall Street Journal, “warn off other academics thinking of doing similar research, and to influence courts where states are losing on the merits.”

English supervised the 2021 National Firearms Survey. Data from this survey of 54,000 American adults estimated that citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; indeed, the survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired.”

To gun-control activists in politics and the media, this finding had to be marginalized. They don’t want people to know that law-abiding Americans need their freedom.

English said that the “attorneys general of Illinois and Washington started issuing subpoenas” for his “documents and communications.” Meanwhile, members of the media contacted him “armed with politicized talking points identical to those used by the state attorneys general in their subpoenas.”

That is legitimately troubling. 

I've seen some of the attacks against English, ironically coming from people whose "research" wouldn't have been deemed acceptable for a middle school science project, and they're ugly. They claim there are issues with his methodology, and that his research was flawed from the start.

This is funny considering this:

The media, however, could not find any actual problems with the research. English’s survey questions had been peer reviewed. He used a professional survey firm that is also “used by researchers at such institutions as Stanford, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

“My survey results are hard to refute because they line up with other independent surveys from Pew and Gallup at the national level,” said English.

In other words, he did everything the way his field demanded and came up with an answer they didn't approve of, but rather than self-censor like so many others, he published them.

And for that, he's being attacked by the anti-gun political establishment, the anti-gun media, and his colleagues who share the same sentiment.

It's like they say, if you're taking flak, you must be over the target.

English has most definitely been over the target because the truth is an enemy of the anti-gun agenda. We know criminals get guns from illegal sources, and those illegal sources obtain them through some degree of theft. Either they steal them personally or get them from someone who does. That doesn't make it in the news reports despite that coming directly from the ATF. That's the truth, but it undermines gun control, so it doesn't get the headlines that some ridiculous study that claims hunting leads to shootings.

In showing what he did, English broke the cardinal rule of gun research: Thou Must Advance Gun Control