Argument: A 2007 Harvard study by Don Kates and Gary Mauser showed that countries with higher gun ownership rates have less crime.
Example: "...more firearms, less crime, concludes the virtually unpublicized research report by attorney Don B. Kates and Dr. Gary Mauser." -Beliefnet
Response:
The study in question was authored by Don Kates and Gary Mauser in 2007, and may be read in its entirety here.
This paper was not a Harvard study: it was published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, which is edited by Harvard undergrads, and describes itself as "the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship". This indicates that the journal in which this paper was published is not as official, or as closely associated with Harvard or its faculty, as its title might suggest. Instead, it's just a right-wing law journal edited by undergraduates without the advanced legal/statistical knowledge of editors of more respected journals. Furthermore, neither Kates nor Mauser have any affiliation with Harvard (Snopes 2015).
The paper itself has many methodological flaws, including comparing middle-/low-income countries to high-income ones like the U.S., thereby obscuring the relationship between gun ownership and homicide when more fair, "apples-to-apples" comparisons are made. Kates & Mauser also make bogus claims about the link between gun ownership and suicide, including incorrectly claiming that people kill themselves another way if guns are no longer available (Hemenway 2009). The report also misrepresents inconclusive CDC and NRC reports as though their conclusions were confidently negative, and overstating the value of correlational evidence on the link between gun ownership and violence (Snopes 2015, Levine et al. 2012).
References:
Hemenway 2009
Levine et al. 2012
Snopes 2015
Further reading:
An interesting article by Eric Garland in which he critiques the Kates & Mauser paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment