One of Donald Trump’s most famous expressions in recent years has been to accuse the legacy mainstream media of being “fake news.”
Trump is right about that, of course. Much of what passes for news from the legacy mainstream media is nothing more than selective reporting to push a preferred narrative and propaganda.
Unfortunately, that same kind of bias is also a problem in academia, including the sciences. Especially vulnerable to this kind of bias are social sciences such as psychology and sociology because they often rely on reported findings from people as opposed to measuring physical objects to gather data.
And as we all know, people perceive things differently from each other.
Then, there is the problem of bias in selecting the data to use for the “research,” and that may be the biggest problem with a recent study about Americans’ exposures to mass shootings. Fortunately, John Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center put together an article to correct the “science” that the research pretended to be. Lott writes,
A new survey titled “Exposure to Mass Shootings in the United States: A National Survey” and published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (SPPE) claims that approximately 6.95% of U.S. adults reported having been present at the scene of a mass shooting (17.93 million), and about 2.18% sustained injuries during such incidents (5.6 million). There were 258 million adults in the US in 2023. The beginning of the paper starts by stating: “Mass shootings, defined as incidents where 4 or more people are shot with a firearm, have become a significant public health concern in the US.” But the survey questions have little relationship to that definition.
Lott continues:
This discussion ignores the rest of the Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) definition, which excludes murders “attributable to any other underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance (armed robbery, criminal competition, insurance fraud, argument, or romantic triangle).” The CRS notes that “a large percentage of those incidents were drug- and/or gang-related.” The survey questions also ignore the “public space” part of the definition.
In fact, the research was so bad that Lott titled the article “Bait and Switch: Public Health Survey Claims 18 million American Adults Present at Mass Shootings and 5.6 million Injured. The Definition of Mass Shootings the Survey Starts with is Less than 2% of the Number they claim, and that is Likely an Overestimate.”
That this was published in a science journal is appalling (and scientists wonder why public trust of “science” has plummeted).
That this “research” will be blindly parroted by anti-2A politicians and the anti-2A legacy mainstream media is infuriating.
But this is how gun control is pushed: junk science hand-in-hand with fake news.
It’s an abomination.
