One wonders how the state of US, gov’t-funded research into correlations of murder and mayhem with numbers of guns compares with, say, smoking and tobacco studies at NIH back when The Tobacco Institute was urging surgeons general to shut up about smoking and lung cancer. Or how federal support for greenhouse gas and climate science may soon be faring as Congressional contrarians put their professor-scoffing footprints on the EPA, NSF, DOE, and other tax-money-dependent outfits.
The question comes to mind on reading this morning’s NYTimes and its one-two punch of stories connecting the National Rifle Association and its lobbyists to a dearth of federal research into the impact on public safety by gun control, or for that matter gun encouragement, laws. Writer Michael Luo, who reports often on economic matters, tackled the science of gun control with a mainbar on the general influence of the NRA behind Congressional resistance to funding such research, and a sidebar on the inherent difficulties such studies have in pinning rates at which people are shot to gun controls or their absence.
Luo ( see NYT profile) has been on the Times team covering the mass killing in Arizona that left its apparent prime target, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, gravely wounded. Attempting to read behind the lines, it is a tempting supposition that frustration over the sparse, solid information on public health and gun control led to today’s reports.
One may, by the way, expect to see a small item on the sidebar soon – in the Times’s corrections box. Today’s story identifies one source, columnist and UCLA-trained economist John R. Lott, as a University of Chicago professor. He is author of a book asserting that the more people carry legal weapons, the less crime there tends to be. Lott has done a great deal of academic work but he’s not listed on the Chicago faculty (hat tip to ksjt reader and Phil. Inquirer reporter Tom Avril for expressing doubt on that score).
– Charlie Petit
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