You would think that someone who goes through all of the multiple years of extra schooling and trouble in getting an M.D. designation would be careful to make sure that anything that he puts out there would be well-researched, well-documented, and rationally thought through.
But, apparently, that’s not always the case (hat tip from here for the lead).
Take Michael L. Nance, M.D. with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Now, I have no reason to believe that Dr. Nance is anything but an excellent doctor when it comes to working with patients.
However, he has some pretty strong opinions about guns and gun control, opinions that you and I would disagree with.
And both his reasoning on this subject and his data source for his “gun violence” data are questionable.
For example, he is quoted in an article in 2020 called, “Most Mass Shootings Occur Within A Mile of a School or a Place Where Children Live, Learn and Play.” In the article, Nance said,
Our findings [about gun violence and children] highlight the sheer extent of the problem and show how closely mass shootings are tied to our communities, and especially to the places where children learn and play.
Now, let’s start with the whole idea that most mass shootings happen within a mile of a school or where kids tend to congregate. The reply to that statement, for anyone who has looked into where mass shootings occur and why, is “Of course they do!”
On the surface, that statement in the article may sound intelligent and eye opening, but in reality it’s completely idiotic in that it tries to be shocking in order to push people to support gun control.
Why is it idiotic?
Because children spend much of their time at schools or at “a place where children live, learn and play.” Seems obvious, right?
And where are gun-free zones? They are overwhelmingly in places at schools or in places “where children live, learn and play.”
That’s exactly why many of those places are gun-free zones in the first place: children are there.
And, then, we have the kicker: What places do mass shooters typically target? Answer: gun-free zones. Because no one will be there to shoot back, and mass shooters can kill more people there before anyone confronts them.
So, of course, most mass shootings tend to happen where children are congregated. Anti-2A advocates have set up the situation so that our children have become the exact people that mass shooters target by making those areas gun-free zones.
And don’t even get me started on why the article published by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia would take gun violence data from the Gun Violence Archive which has been found to have little to no credibility when it comes to the data that they publish (we talked about that here).
To sum all of this up: don’t believe what some anti-2A zealot has to say about gun violence or its solutions just because they have letters or other supposed credentials after their name. They may simple be putting out propaganda.
