> Those statistics compare it to a time when it was absurdly high though
That "absurdly high" time was three decades long, not a one-time blip. Prior to that (i.e in the 1950s) the rate was lower, but going back so long ago the country had a much lower population density.
> Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths.
It's not surprising that those aren't strongly correlated. You get more overdose deaths in rural areas and more drug-related crime in urban areas, because rural areas have longer emergency response times and worse medical services in general, while the higher density of urban areas increases the propensity for robberies by addicts and territorial disputes between dealers.
> And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research.
Meh. The problem is the entire frame is political.
Suppose you have a wife who kills her husband with a gun, a wife who kills her husband with a kitchen knife, a drug dealer who kills a rival with a gun and a drug dealer who kills a rival with a machete. There are two natural categories of homicide there, but it's domestic disputes and gang violence, not guns and knives.
But the CDC will measure what you ask them to, and what you ask them to measure is begging the question. If you ban red cars and then measure accidents involving red cars, they go down, but only because you're purposely trying to manufacture evidence for banning red cars, and purposely trying to frame things in a way where "ban red cars" is the default solution to motor vehicle fatalities. You can't really blame gun owners for objecting to research that uses that type of framing.
The specific example they used is a good one. Someone had the CDC study whether having a gun in the house net improves safety. The frame is explicitly set up so that if the answer is no, the presumptive solution is to not have a gun in the house. But it's a false dichotomy -- it ignores every other possible solution.
Suppose that it goes the other way if you keep the gun in a gun safe. Then we get a net safety benefit if people have guns in gun safes, so what we really need is more gun safes rather than fewer guns and maybe we should provide subsidies for gun safes.
Or the problem is really teenagers gaining access to firearms without adequate safety training, so we would save lives to add firearms safety training to the public school curriculum.
But the framing determines all of that from the beginning. If the only point of the study is to provide government authority to a predetermined narrative, you're doing politics rather than science.
We would benefit from having the science without the politics, but that isn't what has happened, so without some way to separate the science from the politics that is more effective than what we've used in the past, we can't actually get that. And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.
> And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.
You had me until the very end. You made a very persuasive argument regarding the framing of research questions. The problem is that it's too persuasive. Clearly almost all studies are heavily biased by their framing, and it stands to reason politically-based framing biases abound in science generally.
IMO, we'd be better to err on the side of more empirical data and empirically informed policies, however flawed. And we should be prepared to mitigate biases with more data at least as much as we're prepared to shutdown research altogether, which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether.
Yeah, the entire argument was "there might be some bias from the scientific approach so we should just avoid it entirely" which itself is a biased approach in the opposite direction.
I agree with you that more research would be better, but the problem remains how to get the politics out of it.
> which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether.
The text of the Dickey amendment was: "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control".
That's not actually a research ban, but under a Clinton Whitehouse it had been their motivation for doing the research. And at the same time Congress reduced the CDC's funding, so even though they could have potentially still done research on e.g. methods to reduce firearms deaths without gun control, they didn't actually do that and the research was cut out entirely.
We then had some Democrats calling the text a "research ban" because it banned politically-motivated research they wanted, but the larger barrier was really the reduced funding combined with a Democratic executive that didn't really want to do gun research that wasn't directed toward promoting gun control.
Both of those have actually changed as of this year, because Trump signed an appropriations bill last year providing more CDC funding.
The risk now is that because the shoe is on the other foot, if a Trump CDC produces research to the effect that e.g. not prohibiting upstanding adult citizens from carrying a gun in a school zone would help to deter or mitigate school shootings, or showing that a large proportion of shootings are drug/gang related and proposing solutions to address homicides related to that, you may see Democrats decrying bias the other way. Or just ignoring the results entirely and pretending they don't exist.
And that's really the problem. You need people acting in good faith who are willing to take solutions that address the problem without scoring political points against the other team. That isn't a research problem, and more research doesn't fix it if whichever side the outcome of the research disfavors will only dismiss it for not supporting their existing policies.
But if you want more research, it looks like we may be getting it. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it also may not do any good, unless we can get past the partisanship -- because there almost certainly are ways to reduce "gun violence" other than gun control. Which should make everybody happy, other than the people who would rather score political points than actually solve the problem. And those people are themselves the bigger problem in general.
That "absurdly high" time was three decades long, not a one-time blip. Prior to that (i.e in the 1950s) the rate was lower, but going back so long ago the country had a much lower population density.
> Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths.
It's not surprising that those aren't strongly correlated. You get more overdose deaths in rural areas and more drug-related crime in urban areas, because rural areas have longer emergency response times and worse medical services in general, while the higher density of urban areas increases the propensity for robberies by addicts and territorial disputes between dealers.
> And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research.
Meh. The problem is the entire frame is political.
Suppose you have a wife who kills her husband with a gun, a wife who kills her husband with a kitchen knife, a drug dealer who kills a rival with a gun and a drug dealer who kills a rival with a machete. There are two natural categories of homicide there, but it's domestic disputes and gang violence, not guns and knives.
But the CDC will measure what you ask them to, and what you ask them to measure is begging the question. If you ban red cars and then measure accidents involving red cars, they go down, but only because you're purposely trying to manufacture evidence for banning red cars, and purposely trying to frame things in a way where "ban red cars" is the default solution to motor vehicle fatalities. You can't really blame gun owners for objecting to research that uses that type of framing.
The specific example they used is a good one. Someone had the CDC study whether having a gun in the house net improves safety. The frame is explicitly set up so that if the answer is no, the presumptive solution is to not have a gun in the house. But it's a false dichotomy -- it ignores every other possible solution.
Suppose that it goes the other way if you keep the gun in a gun safe. Then we get a net safety benefit if people have guns in gun safes, so what we really need is more gun safes rather than fewer guns and maybe we should provide subsidies for gun safes.
Or the problem is really teenagers gaining access to firearms without adequate safety training, so we would save lives to add firearms safety training to the public school curriculum.
But the framing determines all of that from the beginning. If the only point of the study is to provide government authority to a predetermined narrative, you're doing politics rather than science.
We would benefit from having the science without the politics, but that isn't what has happened, so without some way to separate the science from the politics that is more effective than what we've used in the past, we can't actually get that. And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.