Largest Gun Study Ever: More Guns, More Murder

[DanTex]

74. What I find most troubling is your general attitude toward science.

Which seems to be "I don't need to actually understand the science, I just know it's BS". The problem is, as I'll explain, the very arguments you are using to dismiss research on gun violence are almost precisely the same ones that climate deniers use to dismiss climate research. I presume you are not a climate change denier, but your acceptance or rejection of certain scientific results appears to depend only on politics, rather than substance. Maybe asking you to take an open mind toward science in an area where you hold strong political views is too much to ask.

I'll start with the closest you come to a substantive criticism.

And when you conduct a study but can't even find accurate data for the number of firearms owned, the very core of the study, then the whole study is tripe.

This study uses what is known as a proxy variable. Surely you are not aware of this, but by curtly dismissing proxy variables, a technique that is widely used both in social and physical sciences, you have actually dismissed a large part of climate science as well. You see, there aren't direct temperature measurements going back more than 100 or so years. In order to reconstruct climate patterns before that, scientists need to use proxies -- things like tree rings, ice cores, etc. Presumably, in your mind, this makes climate science "tripe" as well.

Of course, in both cases, the scientists don't just "guess" about what would be a good proxy. Proxies need to be validated statistically. For example, they compare the tree rings to the measured temperatures during the last century, and only after showing that there is a strong correlation do they use the tree rings to extrapolate backwards.

The proxy for gun ownership used in this paper, FS/S, has been validated similarly, by comparing it against survey data where survey data is available. The advantage of FS/S is that, like tree rings, more data is available and it allows more detailed studies to be performed. FS/S has been used and accepted as a proxy for gun ownership in the literature for a decade or so, in various studies, including one of those which I linked to in that last post, and you decided to ignore. I don't know of any serious scholar who would describe a study as "tripe" for using this proxy variable.

More guns, more homicides by guns? Shit, I could have told you that.

You may have a point if there were a corresponding decline in non-gun homicides, because of some substitution effect. Of course, if you were familiar with the literature, you would know that this is not the case. In fact, two of those studies that you declined to read because you were just so certain that they were garbage contain this very finding.

If you don't mind, I'll just stick to the one referenced in this article, that nobody in this thread has read and which has as a co-author a man who wrote a book titled, "Marketing Public Health: Strategies to Promote Social Change".

Now I'm not saying there's anything WRONG with that, but when you require people to pay to even read the study, I tell smell a rat.

The fact that the study is behind a paywall has nothing to do with the author. It has to do with the publisher and the journal. If you dismiss every study that is behind a paywall, you will be dismissing a very large fraction of the scientific research that comes out (a few examples: http://prl.aps.org/, http://jama.jamanetwork.com/issue.aspx). The practice of journals requiring subscriptions is the subject of some debate in scientific communities. Some people believe that all science should be free for everyone. The publishers argue that performing editorial and peer review duties to maintain scientific standards costs money. The unfortunate result of this is that a large portion of scientific publications are only available to people who work at universities or research labs, which maintain subscriptions to the journals, although sometimes free versions of papers can be found elsewhere, such as on the author's home page.

Presumably you didn't know this, which is why you thought the paywall was some kind of scheme by the author to enrich himself and prevent people like you from reading the study. Now, the fact that you are unfamiliar with scientific practice is not in itself troubling -- not everyone can be expected to read scientific journals and keep up to date with the latest policies of scientific publications. The problem is, rather than ask, "why is this behind a paywall?" instead you go strait into denialism mode ("I smell a rat&quot . This truly indicative of the same kind of reflexive anti-intellectualism that still has Texas trying to push creationism into their classrooms.