On August 14 of 2024, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an article about research done exploring the relationship between the opening of deer hunting season and "shootings". The article found that there was a significant increase in "shootings" in rural counties associated with the opening of deer season.
At first glance, the premise appears to be one of establishing by statistics the obvious. Of course there are more "shootings" when deer season opens. The entire point of deer season is to harvest deer by shooting them.
More shooting is done prior to deer season, because many hunters use this time to insure their firearms are functioning and are sighted in properly. They do this by shooting them at targets.
As noted author, writer, and publisher, and my friend of decades, Alan Korwin has noted: Shooting is a sport. Murder is a crime. I would add, suicide is a volitional act.
"Shootings" has been put in quotes, because the article does not define what they determine to be a "shooting". An important part of any research is to define the terms you are using. It appears, by inference, the article defines "shooting" as the same as the Gun Violence Archive, because they rely extensively on the Gun Violence Archive for most of their data. The Gun Violence Archives (GVA) collects data from a variety of public sources. They include most publicly recorded incidents where a firearm is fired and a human is injured or killed, although they include some reported instances where firearms were used defensively and no one was injured or killed. This use of the term "shootings" is designed to push people to associate shooting with illegitimate violence. Because the paper uses location data in its analysis and the GVA does not provide location data for suicides, it seems likely the paper does not include suicides in its analysis, but it is not certain.
There is significant bias in the use of the term "gun violence". "Gun violence" is an Orwellian term designed to associate the use of guns with illegitimate violence. The term "gun violence" frames problems of suicide, murder, assault, and criminal violence as a gun problem instead of behavioral problems.
In essence, the term "gun violence" is a proxy for the assumption: Guns are bad. More guns mean more bad things happen.
The paper recognizes this assumption as the basis for its research. The footnotes are to articles by academics who wish for a disarmed citizenry and who attempt to make this point. From the introduction of the article, bold added:
This research has been predicated on the premise that the prevalence of guns in a given home, community, or nation is likely to make violent incidents more injurious and more deadly.7-12
As this correspondent has repeatedly shown, this assumption is hotly contested, dubious, and contains significant policy bias. It is irrational to prioritize reducing murders, suicides, and assaults performed only with guns, if such policies do not reduce the overall number of murders, suicides, and assaults. The purpose for such policies appears to be to disarm the public, not to reduce murders, suicides, or assaults.
The authors of the study claim little research has been done to show the actual prevalence of guns in private and public settings increases public harm. From the introduction to the article:
However, to our knowledge, few studies have been designed to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the prevalence of firearms in public and private settings to generate evidence on the association between firearm prevalence and shootings.
Numerous studies done by Professor John Lott and others show the increased legal carry of firearms reduces violent crime (public harm), none of those papers is referenced in this paper's footnotes. The increase in firearms carry permits is at least as significant an indicator of more firearms availability as the start of deer season. The footnotes in the paper include articles criticizing Lott, but not papers by Lott or others who support his premise about carry permits.
The results of the study are done in a model. Using models to depict reality is inherently risky, because models depend entirely on the researchers use of various assumptions about the nature of reality. Those assumptions can result in selection bias, confirmation bias, and outcome bias. Models, because they manipulate data more than non-model methods, are subject to the biases of the persons creating the model and choosing what models are valid and what are not.
One of the ways models are used to distort reality is in the substitution of percentages and probabilities for absolute numbers. When you are dealing with very small numbers, a few cases can be used to make extravagant claims. It would have been helpful to know how many incidents the models in the paper are based on. Was the increase in incidents, over the years of the study, 10,000? 1,000? 100? 10? 1? We do not know. Absolute numbers are not reported. The study notes most incidents in the study, where the type of firearm is known, involve handguns. While handguns are sometimes used to hunt deer, long guns are used in far greater numbers.
When you do this sort of study, using data bases, without intimate knowledge of the facts on the ground, you obtain some strange results. This useful figure from the article, shows the geographical location of the counties used in the model. The Big Island of Hawaii is included.
There is a small problem with including the big island of Hawaii. There are no deer on the big island of Hawaii. It is difficult to see how the start of a deer season could have much effect in a county which is isolated from others and has no deer. No effect probably means it had little effect on the statistics of the model used in the paper. It is difficult to be certain. It is included to show how reality and models are not the same. An email sent to lead author Patrick Sharkey, PhD, has not received a reply as of the time of this writing.
As Gun Writer Lee Williams has noted, the principle author of the study receives significant funding from billionaires with radical anti-gun views. From Liberty Park Press:
According to the Laura and John Arnold Foundation’s 2022 IRS form 990, the couple spent $1.7 million on anti-gun research, including $1,065,933 to Sharkey’s employer, Princeton University, “to develop a research infrastructure that helps cities better understand and respond to waves of gun violence.”
Nearly all papers in the "public health" arena approach the subject of firearms with the same prejudiced assumption: Guns are bad. They fail to take into account positive contributions to society which come from the ownership, possession, and use of guns, because they assume such positive contributions do not exist, or are minimal. They never consider hard to measure, but widely accepted benefits, such as crime deterrence. They never consider political power balances, such as deterring government misconduct. For these reasons, such papers and their results should be viewed with a critical eye. They are closer to political advocacy than they are to science.
©2024 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.
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