Research Update:
It's [Still] Not the Guns

Much has changed since last summer. In July 2020, notoriously anti-gun researchers circulated a paper that alleged an association between what they deemed “excess” gun purchases early in the pandemic and violence. This year, the same researchers disproved their original findings with the addition of new data.

Doctor Garen Wintemute and his team at the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center at UC Davis found no association between what they dubbed “excess” firearm purchases and non-domestic firearm violence, and the association they found between excess purchases and domestic firearm violence through May disappeared when either state trends were included in the model or when June and July were added to the time frame.

The findings are buried in the UC Davis press release. ABC News dedicated an article to the original study, but there’s no mention of the newly published research. Bloomberg’s “reporters” at The Trace spent over 700 words on the original study. They added a brief note to that article with a single sentence about the new and contradictory research.

“News” outlets reported on the original non-peer-reviewed paper but spent little to no ink on the new research published in the journal Injury Epidemiology.

Instead, CNN published a piece entitled, “How crime stats lie — and what you need to know to understand them” that cited an anti-gun web scraper for statistics to show an increase in “gun violence.” CNN, of course, used the combined total of suicides, homicides, accidents, and every other intent but focused in on homicides .....