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  • 2015-10-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Harvard University Study Reveals Astonishing Link Between Firearms, Crime and Gun Control (en)
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  • Following the Umpqua Community College shooting in October 2015, an undated article on the web site BeliefNet titled Harvard University Study Reveals Astonishing Link Between Firearms, Crime and Gun Control attracted significant traction on social media. The article (split up across six pages) didn't lead with the name of the study it referenced, and without ever once linking to the document on which it was based, it maintained: While identifying details were curiously absent on the five pages that followed, it was clear the study in question was an item titled Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (Volume 30, Number 2) [PDF]. Of primary importance is the subsequent, widely misapplied label of the word study with reference to the 2007 item in question. The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy describes itself as one of the most widely circulated student-edited law reviews and the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship. Papers published in that journal are (while perhaps competitively sourced) in no way equivalent to peer-reviewed research published in a credible science-related journals as studies. Use of the term study to refer that 2007 article dishonestly suggested that the assertions made by its authors were gathered and vetted under more rigorous study conditions, which didn't appear to be the case. The paper was credited to authors Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser. A profile for Kates (a gun rights enthusiast [PDF]) describes him as [one of the] foremost litigators, criminologists and scholars on the Second Amendment and the fundamental right to self-defense and the individual right to keep and bear arms in the country. Kates was prominently featured in a March 2013 Washington Post article about gun lobby efforts to infiltrate law review publications, and Mauser's web site biography reads: In a document dated June 2009 [PDF], Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center Dr. David Hemenway addressed the 2007 article's flaws in correlating higher rates of gun ownership with lower crime rates thusly: Incidentally, Hemenway is named as a researcher on a 2007 Social Science and Medicine study titled State-Level Homicide Victimization Rates in the US in Relation to Survey Measures of Household Firearm Ownership, 2001–2003. That research (carried out by researchers at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center) found: Hemenway's 2009 writing pointed to weak points in the 2007 paper, such as a highly misleading excerpt that misrepresented two then-recent public health and policy studies. Immediately following a citation of Kates' own prior work (his 1979 book Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out), the authors posited that two large government-backed studies had failed to conclude gun control measures affected crime rates: The first referenced item, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004), pointed to a lack of sufficient data with respect to gun policy (not a failure to conclude that gun control reduced crime): Similarly, the actual wording of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)'s cited report more explicitly conflicted with the authors' assertions that a conclusion had been drawn: In short, the purported 2007 Harvard study with astonishing findings was in fact a polemic paper penned by two well-known gun rights activists. Its findings were neither peer-reviewed nor subject to academic scrutiny of any sort prior to its appearance, and the publication that carried it was a self-identified ideology-based editorial outlet edited by Harvard students. The paper disingenuously misrepresented extant research to draw its conclusions, and researchers at Harvard (among which Kates and Mauser were not included) later objected to the paper's being framed as a study from Harvard (rather than a law review paper). The paper wasn't virtually unpublicized research (as BeliefNet claimed); rather, it was simply not deemed noteworthy at the time it was published due to the fact it was neither a study nor much more than a jointly-written editorial piece representing its authors' unsupported opinions. (en)
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