Highly Touted
Study Tests Non-Existent Policies, Uses Deceptive Data
NRA-ILA
Monday, July 22, 2019
A study published
in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics this
week generated considerable media attention that focused on the purported
finding and not the underlying research design:
Those are some pretty strong headlines. The study behind
these headlines is bogus; it relies on very loose variable definitions and
interpretations, seemingly prioritizes convenience over substance, and was
likely only published because it found that gun-control is good.
Only half of these articles note that “children” in this
study actually includes adults. This is a well-tread deception frequently used
by anti-gun organizations, and we are always surprised when respectable
researchers indulge in this dishonesty. For several years, we thought
researchers had finally acknowledged that 18- and 19-year-old people were not
children but this study adds on everyone through the age of 21.
Twenty-one-year-old people are not children. Children
cannot buy alcoholic drinks or gamble in a casino. These are adults. You won’t
find children enrolled in a medical school but you may find a 21-year-old
adult. We suspect that these students would prefer not to be referred to as
children, given that they have agency over their decisions and almost certainly
have for some time.
But this study includes these adults in their analysis of
“pediatric” firearm deaths. In their (only) five-year study period – despite
decades of previous data and more recent data all readily available – the
researchers identified 21,241 total firearms-related fatalities. The vast
majority of these fatalities (69%) were of adults aged 18 to 21. This does not
specify by intent; 62% of all fatalities were homicides. More than 43% of all
the included fatalities were homicides of 18 to 21-year-old adults. In other
words, more than two in five cases included in this analysis were adults.
A better definition of “child” would limit the included
ages to those aged 14 and under. These are middle schoolers, kids just about to
enter adolescence, and younger.
They’re not adults.
Focusing on actual children would have decreased the
number of cases in this study to under ten percent of the number of cases
actually used.
The paper begins with the claim that “Of note, ~7 US
children die of firearm-related injuries daily.” The citation for this stat is
the CDC WISQARS database but the daily average doesn’t line up with the
definition of children used in this study. The lowest number of
firearms-related fatalities since 1999 when including legal adults through age
21 is much too high to produce that number. Limiting it to children through
18-year-old-adults is close in 2017 – the most recent year of data available,
which wasn’t used in the study itself – but not in any other year since 1999.
If you look at actual children aged 14 and under, the number is vastly lower
than what the authors claim. This begs the question – what definition of child
and what year of data did they use to come up with the 7 per day average? If
they did use 2017 data for children through 18-year-old-adults, why change the
definition for the analysis?
And – perhaps more importantly - why didn’t they use all
of the available data in their analysis?
As we noted, the outcome variable for this study of
pediatric firearms-related mortality included adults. The rest of the equation
– the test and control variables – were just as perplexing. Let’s start with
the simpler issue: the control variables.
Research on firearms policy often includes a control
variable for violent crime and age cohorts, both of which have been found to be
associated with murder rates. Given that 69% of the fatalities here were
homicides and the primary exposure variable was a rating of gun laws (designed
to reduce crime), incorporating these would make sense. The researchers did
control for race, ethnicity, educational attainment, and poverty. They also
included a control for gun ownership.
The gun ownership control is based on a 2013 YouGov
survey that found Hawaii to have the 10th highest gun ownership rate
in the country – higher than Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and well, most
other states. There’s a proxy for gun ownership that has been validated by
researchers, and that puts the states in a vastly different order than the
YouGov survey – which featured self-reported data on gun ownership in February
2013 survey. President Barack Obama and anti-gun politicians were seizing on
the tragedy at Sandy Hook to push gun control. That’s the metric this “study”
used.
Using the validated proxy based on 2011-2015 data,
Hawaii’s gun ownership rate is more than cut in half. New Hampshire’s triples.
Many states have double-digit differences between the two metrics. The
pediatricians who authored this latest study split the variable in two – high
and low gun ownership states. The metric used for the split is important;
fourteen states fall on opposite sides of the binary categorization under each
metric. This group includes low-crime, high gun ownership states like Vermont
and South Dakota.
The primary test variable is the numeric grade assigned
to each state by the Brady Campaign, which gave states scores between -39 to
81. The reviewers at the journal Pediatrics couldn’t be bothered to
check citations, so the Giffords Law Center is cited even though the Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was the actual source of the grades.
Supposedly, the Giffords Law Center (an amalgamation of the Legal Community
Against Violence and Americans for Responsible Solutions) is now the sole
provider of state gun law grades, but they use letter grades. The Brady
Campaign issued numerical grades, and didn’t hesitate to give some states
negative grades.
But the researchers here explain the Brady Campaign’s
grading process as gathering “an expert panel to objectively assess and rate
state firearm legislation on the basis of a series of 33 different gun
policies.” If you can’t trust the organization borne out of a desire to ban all
handguns to be objective about gun policy, who can you trust?
There are also more substantive methodological concerns
about using a grade for a range of policies rather than focusing on a single
policy. Using the grade does not allow for the identification of an effective
policy. All policies are seemingly treated the same – the Brady Campaign did
not make it clear if certain policies were more heavily weighted than others
when determining the grades. Of course, with 31 states
receiving negative grades in 2015 (after nearly a decade
of declining violent crime and murder rates nationwide) how serious can these
grades be?
Of course, the outcome variables matter, too, so back to
the children and adults being disguised as children for the purposes of gun
control. The mortality data for ten states was not available, so the
researchers used the mean annual mortality rate over the five-year period as
these states’ mortality rates for sensitivity analysis. The data was not available
because the number of fatalities fell below the reporting threshold, so the
researchers assigned them the mean – the average – of the available data. That
artificially inflates the number of fatalities because the mean is calculated without
the lowest counts – which were suppressed for the very states for which the
mean is substituting. That was just for the sensitivity analysis; in their
first model, the researchers found that a 10-point increase in a state’s
arbitrary “gun law” score the firearm-related mortality rate among children and
teenagers and adults masquerading as children decreased by 8 points. When
controlling for race, ethnicity, educational attainment, and the supposed gun
ownership metric, they found that a ten-point increase in the anti-gun score is
associated with a four-point decrease in the rate. We would wager that
controlling for violent crime, age cohorts, alcohol consumption, and other
variables commonly used in firearms policy research the effect would further
decrease.
These findings are based on the more than twenty-one
thousand child, teenage, and adult fatalities the authors studied. What would
the result have been if they limited it to actual children?
Let’s take a look at the data for 2011-2015. There were
11,698 firearms-related homicide victims aged 15 to 21 in this limited period.
The three counties with the most victims in this age range accounted for more
than 13% of all such victims. These counties were Cook County, Illinois (graded
40.5 statewide in 2015 by the Brady Campaign); Los Angeles County, California
(76); and Wayne County, Michigan (3, the 18th highest grade). These
three counties accounted for just over 5% of the population aged 15-21 in this
period. All this shows is that other factors – beyond the sheer number of gun
control laws enacted – should be considered when analyzing policy.
Of course, it is also important to consider the specific
policies themselves. This study only looks at three policies outside of the
nonsensical grades: universal background checks for firearm purchases,
universal background checks for ammunition purchases, and
microstamping/ballistic fingerprinting. The pediatricians only found a
statistically significant association between universal background checks and
firearms-related fatalities among children, teenagers, and adults. This
conflicts with
another study
led by well-known anti-gun researchers at UC Davis and the Bloomberg School of
Public Health that found universal background checks had no effect. It also
contradicts the acknowledgements of Bloomberg School professors that so-called
universal background checks just aren’t effective.
But what about the other two policies – universal
background checks on ammunition purchases and firearm identification (ballistic
fingerprint – databases of shell casings – or microstamping). Well, the authors
contend that three states had universal background checks on ammunition –
Massachusetts, Illinois, and Connecticut. In each of these three states, you
must have a firearms license or permit to purchase ammunition. No background
check is done at the point of sale. New York
and Maryland
both abandoned
their ballistic identification databases because they were
extraordinarily expensive and predictably ineffective. California’s
microstamping law is really a ban on new handguns, as the
technology as required by the law does not actually exist.
Neither of these non-existent-in-practice policies was
found to have a significant association with the firearms mortality rate of
children, adolescents, teenagers, and fully-grown men and women through age
twenty-one.
The authors acknowledge that their study did not
establish causality, and that they had no metric to measure enforcement of any
policy. This is a common weakness in firearms policy research, as measuring
enforcement is difficult. However, the mere presence of a law absent of any
enforcement is unlikely to have a chilling effect on criminals. We already know
that criminals don’t
get their guns legally. The Rand Corporation noted in
their 2018 review of
relevant research that background checks that
private-seller background checks (the only sales that do not currently require
a background check under federal law) have an uncertain effect on firearm
homicides.
This study would not have met Rand’s criteria for
inclusion in that review. The research design would not have met the
qualifications as it was not designed to identify a causal effect and it
utilized an aggregate state score instead of testing a specific policy. The
test of so-called universal background checks, while not a test of an aggregate
score, would still not have met the other requirements. We’re not sure how Rand
would have handled the tests of non-existent policies, but we can make a pretty
good guess.
Contrary to their claims, this study does not add
anything to the body of research on firearms policy. The sloppy citation,
seemingly absent peer review, intentionally limited data, and poor choice of
variables should make readers wary of trusting “published” research, but the
anti-gun media sees what the anti-gun media wants to see. Questions, critiques,
and giant flashing neon signs calling a study unreliable at best are all
ignored in the name of the cause.
No death – especially a child’s death – should be
trivialized. But this study took too many liberties to be reliable and yet it
is being held up as an indication that more gun control laws reduce deaths.
In the worst-case scenario, studies like this will be
used to pass laws that will do nothing to stop criminals, help those facing
their darkest hours, or prevent accidents. Instead, studies like this will be
used to inch closer to what the Brady Campaign, Giffords, and other anti-gun
organizations really want: overarching gun control.
….
Our Steady Drip’s founder Sam Sewell is a Disabled
Veteran. Please consider a donation which is a 508(c)(1)(a) a
religious, non-profit, tax exempt organization. If you are not able to give a
monetary donation please pray for Sam’s physical healings, and independence.
Thank you,
Sam’s Researcher.
Best Self USA Ministries Corp
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