I try to keep an eye out for gun studies that pop up. Part of the reason is that I thoroughly enjoy dismantling them. The entire field is a joke from a scientific standpoint, with sloppy methodology that's only tolerated due to ideology.
But sometimes, I miss one, and someone else picks up the abomination passing for science these days.
This time, it was Ammoland that took issue with it, and boy, do I want to talk about it.
Let's go step by step. I'm not going to rip Ammoland apart because they said nothing I disagree with. There's just a lot to digest.
“Most school shooters grew up with guns as key part of social life, study suggests,” Phys.org claimed on MSN. “A new analysis of school shootings in the U.S. suggests that most shooters had a social background in which guns were a key leisure item, with attached meanings of bonding and affection, which also translated into easy access to firearms.”
That certainly sounds like the study’s author, sociologist Anne Nassauer of the University of Erfurt, believes she’s exploring a new area of inquiry that can yield valuable insights in understanding school shootings, which will be necessary knowledge if society ever hopes to effectively deter them.
Too bad she starts her “Abstract” with a false assertion that absolves us of any responsibility to take the rest of what she says seriously:
“Firearms are the leading cause of death for minors in the United States and US gun culture is often discussed as a reason behind the prevalence of school shootings.”
“The first question is: What is a child?” economist, author, and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, John Lott writes, noting:
Guns Are Not the Leading Cause of Children’s Deaths…The bottom line is that about a third of the firearm deaths for those under 20 involve homicide, where the victims are 18 and 19 years old. Approximately 20% involve homicides for 15, 16, and 17-year-olds. These deaths are largely gang-related, and even banning guns is unlikely to stop drug gangs from obtaining guns to protect their extremely valuable drugs.
We've seen this an awful lot, and yeah, these are legal adults who are not children. They're not remotely children. Often, they're engaged in some form of criminal enterprise. When you look at the CDC's statistics and don't count 18- and 19-year-olds from the dataset, this claim evaporates. It's simply not true of actual minors.
Moreover, for a study that purports to look at school shootings, it fails to note that the vast majority of these fatalities, even of actual children, don't take place at school.
That's an important point that cannot be overstated.
Moving on...
It’s not just “What is a child?” As the National Association for Gun Rights demonstrates, it’s also appropriate to ask, “What is a school shooting?”
“Not only are they fluffing up those numbers, but they also use NDs to make the claim that there were 349 school shootings in 2023. Friend of NAGR Brandon Herrera did a great job dismantling this argument when he testified alongside us against the Colorado ‘assault weapons’ ban and was asked why ‘the United States has had 57 times as many school shootings as every other G7 country,’ answering ‘Because of the way you track your statistics. That statistic is a sham. I’ve seen it a negligent discharge in a parking lot that injures nobody is counted as a school shooting.’”
As for Nassauer’s assertion that “US gun culture is often discussed as a reason behind the prevalence of school shootings,” left unaddressed is who is “often discussing it,” and the answer, of course, is those with vested interests in poisoning the well, the gun prohibitionist lobby, Democrat politicians, and the anti-gun media.
And we've seen this repeatedly as well. A round fired from off campus, with no intention of harming the school or anyone in it, hit the building at two in the morning, and it gets counted as a school shooting. Negligent discharges by SROs get counted as school shootings by this group. Incidents that happen in the parking lot on a Saturday when no one else is there get classified as a school shooting.
The numbers are inflated as much as possible, much like how the Gun Violence Archive inflates mass shooting numbers. It's all an attempt to make the problem look bigger so people will favor certain solutions to that problem, namely gun control.
And yes, gun culture is "often discussed as a reason behind" these shootings, but the author is right that it's discussed by people who are downright hostile toward the gun culture in the first place.
More importantly, so what?
I understand the premise is that most school shooters grew up as part of gun culture, but did they? Growing up with a gun in the home might be how many of us grew up, but there's a big difference between my growing up with my father's police service weapon and hunting guns in the house and a gang-banger's nephew growing up with his uncle's black market gun in the house.
Does the study actually differentiate between types of gun ownership? I doubt it.
There's a reason so many of us refuse to "trust the science" on crap like this.
