One element of President
Obama’s
gun control agenda is research by the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), which may sound unobjectionable. It
is not. Here is how the White House describes the situation:

For years, Congress has subjected the [CDC] to restrictions
ensuring it does not “advocate or promote gun control,”
and some members of Congress have claimed this
restriction prohibits the CDC from conducting any research on the
causes of gun violence. However, public health research
on gun violence is not advocacy.

That last part is debatable, to say the least. In
Reason‘s April 1997 cover
story, gun policy scholar Don Kates and two co-authors
persuasively argued that “public health research on gun violence,”
as distinct from research by criminologists, is anti-gun
propaganda in pseudoscientific disguise, starting from the premise
that firearms are disease vectors that need to be controlled by the
government:

Contrary to [the] picture of dispassionate scientists under
assault by the Neanderthal NRA and its know-nothing allies in
Congress, serious scholars have been criticizing the CDC’s “public
health” approach to gun research for years. In a presentation at
the American Society of Criminology’s 1994 meeting, for
example, University of Illinois sociologist David Bordua and
epidemiologist David Cowan called the public health literature on
guns “advocacy based on political beliefs rather than scientific
fact.” Bordua and Cowan noted that The New England Journal
of Medicine and the Journal of the American
Medical Association, the main outlets for CDC-funded studies
of firearms, are consistent supporters of strict gun control. They
found that “reports with findings not supporting the position of
the journal are rarely cited,” “little is cited from the
criminological or sociological field,” and the articles that are
cited “are almost always by medical or public health
researchers.”

Further, Bordua and Cowan said, “assumptions are presented as
fact: that there is a causal association between gun ownership and
the risk of violence, that this association is consistent across
all demographic categories, and that additional legislation will
reduce the prevalence of firearms and consequently reduce the
incidence of violence.” They concluded that “[i]ncestuous and
selective literature citations may be acceptable for political
tracts, but they introduce an artificial bias into scientific
publications. Stating as fact associations which may be
demonstrably false is not just unscientific, it is unprincipled.”
In a 1994 presentation to the Western Economics
Association, State University of New York at
Buffalo criminologist Lawrence Southwick compared public
health firearm studies to popular articles produced by the gun
lobby: “Generally the level of analysis done on each side is of a
low quality. The papers published in the medical literature (which
are uniformly anti-gun) are particularly poor science.”

The public health approach to guns has yielded

findings like this one by emergency room physician Arthur
Kellermann, cited uncritically by Skeptic magazine
Publisher Michael Shermer in a recent Los Angeles
Times op-ed
piece:

Here’s another sobering statistic. According to a 1998 study
published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery,
for “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or
legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional
shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted
or completed suicides.” In other words, a gun is 22 times more
likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or
injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for
self-defense.

From this Shermer concludes that “arming yourself isn’t an
answer.” But as scholars such as Florida State University
criminologist Gary Kleck have been pointing out for decades (and as
Kates et al. note in their Reason article), counting
only shootings vastly underestimates the use of guns
for self-defense, which according to survey data typically involves
nothing more than brandishing a weapon to deter an attacker.

I described
a more recent
example of what public health research on gun violence has to
offer in the February 2010 issue of Reason:

In Philadelphia, according to researchers at the University of
Pennsylvania, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting
shot. Since “guns did not protect those who possessed them,”
epidemiologist Charles C. Branas and four co-authors conclude in
the November American Journal of Public Health,
“people should rethink their possession of guns.” This is like
noting that possessing a parachute is strongly associated with
being injured while jumping from a plane, then concluding that
skydivers would be better off unencumbered by safety
equipment. 

Branas and his colleagues paired 677 randomly chosen gun assault
cases with “population-based control participants” who were
contacted by phone shortly after the attacks and matched for
age group, gender, and race. They found that “people with a gun
were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not
possessing a gun.”

The researchers suggest several possible explanations for this
association: “A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact,
instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly
armed persons. Along the same lines, individuals who are in
possession of a gun may increase their risk of gun assault by
entering dangerous environments that they would have normally
avoided. Alternatively, an individual may bring a gun to an
otherwise gun-free conflict only to have that gun wrested away and
turned on them.”

The one explanation Branas et al. don’t mention is that people
who anticipate violent confrontations—such as drug dealers,
frequently robbed bodega owners, and women with angry
ex-boyfriends—might be especially likely to possess guns, just as
people who jump out of airplanes are especially likely to possess
parachutes. The closest the authors come to acknowledging that
possibility is their admission, toward the end of the article, that
they “did not account for the potential of reverse causation
between gun possession and gun assault”—that is, the possibility
that a high risk of being shot “causes” gun ownership, as opposed
to the other way around.

Why would Obama want to waste taxpayer money on this sort of
tendentious, prejudice-confirming research? I bet you can figure
that out—without a government grant.