[538] This Year’s CDC Gun Injury Data Is Even Less Reliable Than Last Year’s - Polidicks

The article that precipitated the Dickey Amendment was a routine academic document published outside of the CDC but using its data. Its contents were only controversial for asserting that gun ownership could be studied in the context of public health in the first place instead of remitting the issue entirely to one of personal politics. The NRA mounted a colossal lobbying effort to crush the theory behind the study by discrediting it and then went off after the CDC as its most logical target. The Dickey Amendment says: "That none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control " If you believe that gun ownership is not a dimension of public health policy, then this statement makes total sense. If you're a health professional working for the government's leading public health institution, or a person who believes in the potential consequentiality in any set of a data, it sounds like the insane double-negative tautology it is.

I mean, EcksDee's source also mentions congress reduced the CDC's funding of the amount that was previously used to conduct those studies. So I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be. It's not as easy to conduct more quality studies with less funding. I don't know the political context at the time so I'm not sure whether that was the exact intent. Even then, you know what they say about good intentions.

Guns were not nearly as hot an issue in the 90s as they are now, that's why the AWB actually passed in '94. If Dickey has since turned on the amendment and pushed to get it repealed then I would argue that his intentions were as stated despite what the amendment was used to do.

Adds up. It's weird to remember that politics used to be reasonable a few decades ago.

I don’t have an exact source at the moment but I believe the CDC was caught several years ago trying to make their study on gun violence support a predetermined conclusion for political purposes. In response, a law was passed forbidding them from conducting any research for the purposes of advocating for gun control.

That is true, there was an unintended chilling effect for some time. Fortunately, however, the CDC eventually did resume research into gun violence. One prominent example is that after the Sandy Hook shooting, the Obama administration directed a CDC study on gun violence, which turned out a comprehensive report on contributing factors to American gun violence. It was released, offered pragmatic solutions that matched neither side's soundbites, and was quietly dropped. So they have been doing research, but it isn't widely reported. Arthur Kellermann's study was funded by the CDC, and was a methodological trash fire. To summarize, it was intended to assess the efficacy of defensive use of firearms, and did so by comparing death-by-homicide rates among gun owners against a non-gun-owning control group. Seems reasonable on the face of it, but: -The study determined the gun ownership rate for the control group by asking people if a neighbor owned loaded guns, which produced a rate dramatically lower than the national average, and made no effort to rectify this discrepancy. It simply took it for granted that everyone knows conclusively whether or not their neighbors have loaded guns readily accessible. -The study didn't count any defensive use of a gun that didn't involve the death of an intruder. There's been plenty of research indicating that guns are used for self-defense far more often than justifiable homicides occur- the most conservative estimate is 88,000 per year (highest is ~3 mil), far in excess of the ~350 justifiable homicides per year. So scaring off an intruder didn't count, nor did shooting and wounding an intruder. -The study made no effort whatsoever to account for correlative factors. For example, the fact that someone who lives in a bad neighborhood, or is a gang member, is both more likely to be a victim of homicide and more likely to own a gun. According to the methodology of the study, if someone bought a gun because they were afraid for their safety, and then they got murdered (without the gun ever being involved), that gun contributed to their death. -Even with those biases, if you apply the same methodology used in the study to other factors, you find that having a gun in the home is far less strongly correlated with being a victim of homicide than having drugs, renting your home, or living alone. Lots of research has flaws, and we can't expect every study to be methodologically perfect. But when Kellermann produced this study after a decade of outright misrepresenting other work, overtly in support of gun control measures, it's hard not to see a pattern. And the CDC both funded and promoted his work. The CDC is permitted to research gun violence. They are not permitted to use federal funds to finance bad science towards overtly political ends, which is what the Kellermann study was. It should be telling that no other agency has been treated like this. FEMA, for example, isn't barred from publishing research supporting climate change, despite it being similarly unpopular with Republicans in Congress. The CDC made a serious misstep under bad leadership, and was rebuked for it.

Not to contradict the rest of your points, or even this specific point as a whole, but if the number you cite for DGU is from the study you mentioned in another thread, then it's worth noting that this study itself seems to have some fundamental methodical flaws. It's based on self-reporting, which isn't exactly reliable, and also extrapolates its results to the whole of the US from a rather small sample that may or may not be representative. I mean, if even the person behind this very law openly said that it went too far and didn't have the intended effect, I think it's safe to say that it didn't exactly allow the CDC to genuinely research gun violence unimpeded.

"Underreporting of gun ownership by control respondents could bias our estimate of risk upward. We do not believe, however, that misreporting of gun ownership was a problem. In two of our three study communities, a pilot study of homes listed as the addresses of owners of registered handguns confirmed that respondents' answers to questions about gun ownership were generally valid21. Furthermore, the rate of gun ownership reported by control respondents in each study community was comparable to estimates derived from previous social surveys22 and Cook's gun-prevalence index15." "Attempted resistance was reported in 184 cases (43.8 percent). In 21 of these (5.0 percent) the victim unsuccessfully attempted to use a gun in self-defense. In 56.2 percent of the cases no specific signs of resistance were noted. Fifteen victims (3.6 percent) were killed under legally excusable circumstances. Four were shot by police acting in the line of duty. The rest were killed by another member of the household or a private citizen acting in self-defense." "We restricted our study to homicides that occurred in the home of the victim, because these events can be most plausibly linked to specific individual and household characteristics. If, for example, the ready availability of a gun increases the risk of homicide, this effect should be most noticeable in the immediate environment where the gun is kept. Although our case definition excluded the rare instances in which a nonresident intruder was killed by a homeowner, our methodology was capable of demonstrating significant protective effects of gun ownership as readily as any evidence of increased risk." "Four limitations warrant comment. First, our study was restricted to homicides occurring in the home of the victim. The dynamics of homicides occurring in other locations (such as bars, retail establishments, or the street) may be quite different. " "Third, it is possible that reverse causation accounted for some of the association we observed between gun ownership and homicide -- i.e., in a limited number of cases, people may have acquired a gun in response to a specific threat. If the source of that threat subsequently caused the homicide, the link between guns in the home and homicide may be due at least in part to the failure of these weapons to provide adequate protection from the assailants. " Cool, produce the studies then Sorry am I wrong but seems like pretty much every issue you have with the study seems to be based on a misunderstanding either of the methodology or of the facts? They even say MANY TIMES how these are POTENTIAL links, and MAY be significant, IN PART, POSSIBLY.

Thanks for taking the time to enumerate the flaws of the study. I wasn't aware of them or of Kellerman's professional history. I think FEMA is a rather unfortunate example but I see your underlying point. But I still think it's a case of having one's cake to point at the unreliability of CDC data years after their chastening and believe that's it's not in part due to the attrition of funding and experts - since and because of the Dickey Amendment - who believe the outcome of their research may land them in legal jeopardy if it contains certain insinuations, with hugely diminished funding. And to respond more specifically to you: ultimately, you must recognize that the political mobilization for the Dickey Amendment was just as charged with bias as the study itself, at least? The man himself said he regrets the outcome.

That would be the 3 million figure cited by Kleck & Gertz, yes, which is why I took the absolute lowest bound of 88k cited by the National Crime Victimization Survey. The NCVS has its own methodological errors that bias its result lower than what is likely accurate, but even then, it dwarfs the number of homicides by a good margin. Citing previous social surveys with the same under-reporting biases is justifying errors with more errors. For example, the fact that they confirmed their results in part using handgun registration, not taking into account the prevalence of non-registered (ie illegal) handguns among disadvantaged communities. They simply never account for the fact that their results don't match the national average- at the very least it should be an enormous red flag that hey, your sample group doesn't accurately represent the broader population. Yes? The study was limited to examining homicide victims, so they only noted attempted resistance in cases where the victim (homeowner) was killed, of which only a handful could be construed as self-defense. There was no analysis performed on cases where a firearm was successfully used defensively, which even the lowest estimates predict occurs far more often than either homicide or justifiable homicide. That means that all they're going off of is the death rate among gun owners versus the death rate among non-gun-owners, and that introduces significant sources of error. The study briefly mentions some of these sources of error, as you pointed out, and then gives a big fat 'oh well' and brushes it off. Let's be absolutely clear about this: The very first line of the study's abstract is 'It is unknown whether keeping a firearm in the home confers protection against crime or, instead, increases the risk of violent crime in the home.' To answer this question, they only looked at cases where firearms failed to protect against crime. Rather begging the question, isn't it? If you want to actually answer the question of whether keeping a firearm in the home confers protection, you should be comparing victimization rates of living people against victimization rates of demographically-similar people as well. And then those figures of defensive gun uses per year start becoming relevant, and start painting a very different picture. Dude, it's the same study. Look at the univariate analysis section under Results. Table 3. https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/1993/nejm_1993.329.issue-15/nejm199310073291506/production/images/img_large/nejm199310073291506_t3.jpeg While I'm here, check out the lines for 'Rifle' and 'Shotgun'. Both show an inverse correlation with victimization. The report then never mentions this. "Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance." "Although firearms are often kept in homes for personal protection, this study shows that the practice is counterproductive." "Despite the widely held belief that guns are effective for protection, our results suggest that they actually pose a substantial threat to members of the household." There's no 'potential', 'may', 'in part', or 'possibly' in those sentences. The study is very clear in its implications. It's making statements. Even though their results show that people who owned rifles or shotguns were less likely to be murdered than the control group, and even though their study shows that a host of mundane factors are more strongly correlated with homicide than gun ownership, the study is outright concluding that guns are useless for protection, without ever studying people who successfully protected themselves with a firearm, or accounting for external correlations beyond 'yeah there might be some error'. This is garbage, and a scientifically-rigorous institution like the CDC should be downright embarrassed to have promoted it.

Actually nvm I agree on this statement, the other two you brought out are still "suggest" and "associated with" but this one is kinda presumptious, but its 1 am so for my own sanity I aint reading the rest for now

I thought the CDC were banned from researching gun stuff.