Why Do We Believe That A Gun Keeps Us Safe?
Our friends at UC-Davis have just published
an article on the connection between increased gun sales and gun-injury rates. The
good news about the article is that it is open source, which means you can download
it here and read it for free. So I commend Garen Wintemute and his colleagues
for giving everyone in Gun-control Nation an opportunity to share their
research findings for free.
That’s the good news. After I summarize their research
and what they learned, I’m going to mention the bad news. And the bad news is what
Wintemute and his research team didn’t bother to learn. But first, here’s see what
they learned.
The research covers a ‘spike’ in handgun sales in
California in California following the 2012 re-election of The Bomber and the
Sandy Hook massacre, two events that occurred within a space of five weeks. The
authors define a ‘spike’ as a “sharp and short-lived increase in firearm
sales.” From this, the authors then
attempt to test the following hypothesis, namely, that “the sudden and
unanticipated influx of firearms in a concentrated area such as a city could
result in increases in firearm harm.” The research covered injury data
from 499 California cities along with a complete run of handgun sales which are
recorded individually and kept by the California DOJ.)
Here’s where I have to raise a small, red flag. The
authors claim that they measured the spike in gun sales from the date of
Obama’s election until six weeks post-Sandy Hook. But what this analysis fails
to consider is whether the spike was only a response to those two events rather
than reflecting the release of pent-up demand which developed prior to Obama’s
second win.
I spent the entire Summer and Fall of 2012 sitting by
myself in my gun shop because I didn’t know one, single gun nut who thought
that Romney wasn’t going to be inaugurated President in 2013. Even Romney
believed this fantasy and so did everyone else. Which is why gun sales
collapsed during the run-up to that election, because everyone knows that when
the White House is occupied by a Republican, the gun business goes into the
toilet, prices collapse and why not wait a few months before buying your next
gun? After all, it’s not as if anyone needs to buy another gun.
If the UC-Davis researchers wanted to get a clear
picture of the post-election spike, what they should have done was to factor in
the trend of gun sales before the cataclysmic event took place. Gun
sales always pick up in November and over the next three to four months, but
the comparison should be judged not just by looking forward in time, but also
by looking back.
Did the researchers find an ‘association’ between the
gun spike in November-December and an increase in gun injuries over the following
year? Of course they did, although the percentage of gun injuries (4%) was
substantially less than the percentage increase of handguns that were floating
around. Again, I am somewhat leery of how the research team computed what they
refer to as ‘excess handguns’ (meaning more guns being sold than were usually
the case) because of the issue of pent-up demand.
Okay,
now here comes the bad news.
We have
all kinds of evidence that gun sales spike after mass shootings or other events
that might portend new regulations reducing the availability of guns. Much of
this research is referenced by the UC-Davis team. But to me, the question that
really matters and that nobody in the public health research domain seems
interested in understanding is this: Why do some people actually believe that a
gun will protect them from the kind of harm represented by what took place at
Sandy Hook?
If
public health researchers like Wintemute and his colleagues would sit down and
try to figure that one out, maybe just maybe we could hold a reasonable
discussion with gun owners about the risk of owning those guns.
Is that
too much to ask?
