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should come as no surprise to most readers that
"objective" government studies are often anything but.
In fact, the game is an old one: If you put the right people on
a panel, and ask them the right questions, you can pretty well
be assured of getting the answers you want. That appears to be
what is going on with a Clinton administration-inspired National
Academy of Sciences study bearing the innocuous title of
"Improving Research Information and Data on Firearms,"
which opens its formal hearings on Thursday.
According
to the NAS, "The goals of this study are to
1.) assess the existing research and data on firearm violence;
2.) consider how to credibly evaluate the various prevention,
intervention and control strategies;
3.) describe and develop models of illegal firearms markets; and
4.) examine the complex ways in which firearms may become
embedded in the community."
Conspicuously
absent from these goals is any research into the benefits
of firearms becoming "embedded" in communities, as
demonstrated by the research of scholars like John
Lott of the American Enterprise Institute and Gary
Kleck of Florida State University.
Most of
the people selected for the panel have reputations as good
scholars, but none of them have specialized in firearms policy.
Most of them have reputations as being antigun. Steven
Levitt, has been described as "rabidly antigun."
The panel
also includes former Jimmy Carter Attorney General Benjamin
Civiletti — a long-time antigun advocate, and a strong
supporter of America's leading gun-prohibition group, Handgun
Control, Inc. (formerly known as "the National Council to
Control Handguns," and recently renamed "The Brady
Campaign").
The
closest that anyone on the panel gets to not being entirely
antigun is James Q. Wilson — a distinguished scholar (but no
specialist in gun policy), who has said that most gun control
doesn't work, but who expresses almost no concern for the rights
of legitimate gun owners who are harmed by ineffective laws, and
who supports high-tech spy cameras to find people carrying guns.
(Notwithstanding the fact that handgun carrying is legal in 33
states by statewide law, and is allowed in many of the rest, on
a county by county basis.)
The NAS
study will receive $900,000 from the prohibitionist Joyce
Foundation, which lavishly funded the Chicago-Kent Law Review's
one-sided anti-Second Amendment symposium last year, and which
has contributed generously to gun-prohibition groups. It is a
fair inference that the Joyce Foundation thinks that the panel
is very likely to produce results that will advance its mission.
Other funders are the Centers for Disease Control (which was the
main funder for antigun junk science, until Congress cut off
funding in 1995), and the David & Lucile Packard Foundation,
which is also a contributor to antigun groups. Just imagine what
gun-control advocates would say if a government study were
funded by the NRA or the Scaife Foundation.
The panel
is supposed to propose "new…control strategies." The
idea of repealing "control strategies" which social
scientists have proven to be failures isn't on the agenda. Nor
is there any agenda for "strategies" to improve public
safety by fostering gun ownership and carrying by law-abiding
people — even though social-science data from John Lott and
others overwhelmingly show that this strategy really does reduce
crime.
The
reading packets which have been prepared for the committee are
rife with antigun junk science. The committee members find
material applauding the study claiming that Seattle and
Vancouver are demographically similar (although the latter has
virtually no blacks or Hispanics) and that gun control is the
reason for Vancouver's lower homicide rate (even though Seattle
whites have a lower homicide rate than Vancouver whites, and
difference in homicide rates between the two cities is strongly
correlated to Seattle's black and Hispanic population).
The
committee reading packets contain fulsome praise not only for
the Dr. Arthur Kellermann's Seattle/Vancouver junk-science
article, but for many of the rest of his junk-science
productions, like the claim that owning a gun triples the risk
of being murdered (even though hardly any of Kellermann's murder
victims were killed with a gun from their own home, and a
significant number of the murder "victims" were
lawfully killed by police, and the whole factoid disappears once
you account for the true rates of gun ownership among the
"control group" of people who weren't murdered).
Or the
ludicrous study claiming that Washington, D.C.'s 1976 handgun
ban reduced homicide — even though homicide in the soared to
national record levels after the ban was enacted, while nearby
Baltimore (which didn't ban handguns) had no such catastrophic
increase. It turns out the "decline" in D.C. homicides
was created by pretending that the low-homicide years of 1975-76
were the products of the 1976 handgun ban, which was put into
place in the last quarter of 1976 through February 1977.
Not one
sentence in any of the official materials prepared for the
committee criticizes any gun-control law. The committee
members were not given even one of the many social-science
articles detailing the failures of various gun-control laws.
The NAS
study was originally planned during the Clinton administration,
and the study outline and panel makeup ensure that it will
produce a properly Clintonian outcome — just in time for the
Democrats to use against President Bush in the 2004 elections.
Rather than go along with this time-bomb strategy, President
Bush should send the NAS back to the drawing board, to come up
with a study that also examines the benefits, not just the
costs, of firearms, and that does so with a panel containing
scholars on all sides of the issue. There is no reason to allow
the National Academy of Sciences to be hijacked to advance a
partisan political agenda through a stacked panel that will
address artificially narrow subjects.
If the
Bush administration and the National Academy of Sciences value
honest research, and value the reputation of the National
Academy, they will see that this study is either canceled, or
reconstituted in a fair and balanced fashion, so that scholars
can challenge each other. The panel should still include
scholarly gun-control advocates like Levitt, but there's no
reason for the panel to include people like Civiletti, who have
no social-science expertise. And the funding for a National
Academy of Sciences study ought to come exclusively from the
federal government, not from prohibitionist foundations.
The first
meeting of the proposed study group is scheduled for this
Thursday and Friday, August 30-31. After that, it will become
increasingly difficult to change the course of this study,
however ill conceived.
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