Category: Science

Do Right-to-Carry Concealed Weapons Laws Still Reduce Crime?

A review of the literature studying the effect of right-to-carry laws shows that the weight of evidence indicates that such laws reduced violent crime.

However, more recent studies, using more recent data, tend to find that these laws cause increases in various kinds of violent crime, raising the possibility that circumstances have changed since 2000, causing these laws to become detrimental.

We suggest that these recent studies, which do not use all the available data, are seriously compromised because they compare states that only recently have adopted right-to-carry laws with states that have had these laws for many years, instead of comparing against states with more restrictive laws.

Early adopting states experienced relatively large reductions in crime corresponding to large increases in the number of right-to-carry permits. Late adopting states passed rules making it difficult to obtain permits and exercise the right to carry concealed weapons. Ignoring the fact that these late adopting states with stricter rules on obtaining permits issue relatively few permits can produce perverse results where coefficients imply an increase in crime even though the opposite is true.

We demonstrate this effect with a simple statistical test.

SSRN-id3850436

FYI; All data pulled from massshootingtracker.site which freely and openly admit their definition of ‘mass shooting’ isn’t what the FBI uses for its Uniform Crime Report (and which just happens to increases the number of incidents)

Here are a few tidbits according to the data provided for 2021:

California has the 3rd highest number of mass shootings (54 by their definition).

New York was 5th with 41.

Both have had magazines and AR bans for 28 and 9 years respectively.

Inversely Alaska, Idaho, New Hampshire, and South Dakota have had only 1 mass shooting with no such gun control laws.

Hrmmm. I think I see the possibility of a pattern emerging. It’s like gun control doesn’t just not work, it makes the problem worse!

The number I’ve seen is that it is estimated that the lockdowns prevented on average  0.2%  – that’s “Maybe Two (2) out of a Thousand” – deaths in comparison with just trusting people to do the right thing.
Sorry, that small of a number is statistical noise, which means that there is no evidence the lockdowns did anything but disrupt our entire economy and empower the tyrant authoritarians. Which, to be frank is the silver lining because they’re now exposed to the world for future action.

Johns Hopkins Analysis: ‘Lockdowns Should be Rejected Out of Hand.’

The aura of “expert” has lost its luster during Covid, as our supposedly bigger brains have been proved wrong repeatedly.

Two of these have been Ezekiel Emanuel and Anthony Fauci. Both were enthusiastic proponents of societal lockdowns as a means of preventing deaths and the spread of Covid. We now know from a Johns Hopkins blockbuster meta-analysis that “shutting it down,” in Donald Trump’s awkward phrase, did very little to prevent deaths.

It’s a long, arcane, and detailed analysis, and I can’t present every nuance or statistic here. But I think these are the primary takeaways. From the study:

Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results are in line with the World Health Organization Writing Group (2006), who state, “Reports from the 1918 influenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to dramatically reduce transmission […]

In Edmonton, Canada, isolation and quarantine were instituted; public meetings were banned; schools, churches, colleges, theaters, and other public gathering places were closed; and business hours were restricted without obvious impact on the epidemic.” Our findings are also in line with Allen’s (2021) conclusion: “The most recent research has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid 19 deaths.”

Why might that be?

Mandates only regulate a fraction of our potential contagious contacts and can hardly regulate nor enforce handwashing, coughing etiquette, distancing in supermarkets, etc. Countries like Denmark, Finland, and Norway that realized success in keeping COVID-19 mortality rates relatively low allowed people to go to work, use public transport, and meet privately at home during the first lockdown. In these countries, there were ample opportunities to legally meet with others.

Worse, the lockdowns caused tremendous harm:

Unintended consequences may play a larger role than recognized. We already pointed to the possible unintended consequence of SIPOs, which may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness. But often, lockdowns have limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places. Indeed, we do find some evidence that limiting gatherings was counterproductive and increased COVID-19 mortality

What lessons should be learned (my emphasis)?

The use of lockdowns is a unique feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have not been used to such a large extent during any of the pandemics of the past century. However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.

To which I would add another: We can never squelch free discourse and debate on public-health issues again.

People who argued against the “scientific consensus” about the lockdowns were stifled, censored by Big Tech, denigrated by the media, and mocked by establishment scientists. That was essentially “anti-science.” The scientific method needs heterodox voices to speak freely if it is to function properly.

This subsequent look-back shows why. To a large degree, those with the officially disfavored views–such as the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration—were correct on this matter.

Will we learn the lesson? Yes, if our goal is to ably discern and apply the best policy options, which can be a messy process. No, if the point is to allow those in charge of institutional science to exert societal control.

But, of course, demoncraps want to for more access to your children……….. to indoctrinate them into being good little serfs.

reQuote O’ The Day
If a foreign nation forced this kind of education system on us,
it would considered an act of war.

Shovel More Dirt on Pre-K

I would ordinarily shy away from doing an old-school blog post that simply links to something else, but this feels like a study that calls out for an exception. I’ve just been reading a paper in the journal Developmental Psychology1, thanks to a friend’s library access. It’s a pre-K study that has many virtues, including

  1. Large n (2990 kids)
  2. Genuine random assignment
  3. Longitudinal design
  4. Confirms my priors

… and it says kids who were assigned to the pre-K condition actually did worse than kids who were not.

VPK = Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K

Pre-K advocates tend to fixate on non-academic indicators as a way to justify pre-K programs. But attendance was mildly worse for the pre-K group:

Attendance rates in sixth grade (proportion of instructional days without a recorded absence) were high for both TN-VPK participants and nonparticipants. Nonetheless, the difference between groups was statistically significant with a slightly higher rate for nonparticipants (97.5% vs. 97.1%, p = .013 for the ITT analysis with observed values). Supplemental Table S11 provides model details for each year (see also Supplemental Figure S3). Sixth grade was the first academic year with a significant attendance difference between conditions, although there were marginally significant effects in kindergarten and first grade.

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Trending Data Among Women First-Time Gun Owners

According to the NSSF, approximately 11 million Americans purchased their first firearm in the past 2 years, and it is estimated that half of them were women. A Girl & A Gun Women’s Shooting League (AG & AG) polled new members who were new gun owners to learn more about them. This article provides trending data among this demographic.

AG & AG offered the same survey to new members over the past two years. If a woman indicated she was a new shooter (acquiring a firearm within the past year), she was asked additional follow-up questions. The responses for the new-shooter specific questions totaled 1,176 women responses in 2020 and 1,706 in 2021, providing a good glimpse into general trends of this specific demographic.

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Year-End Musings on COVID, Science, and Chainsaws

COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.

The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It’s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.

I’m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.

I think I’m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I’m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I’m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I’ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his tweet from May 5, 2020: “Look at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. … Be smart.”

Here’s why they shouldn’t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But “follow the science” makes no more sense than “follow the chainsaw.” The chainsaw doesn’t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science—let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it—can’t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.

Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one’s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for “listen to the experts,” Cuomo wrote the book on COVID expertise, and that book’s fall has been as spectacular as its author’s plummet.

Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic—a pejorative that didn’t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, “I Have Been Through This Before,” on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn’t end the pandemic, she wrote, “doctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.”

The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show their children sufficient love—a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim’s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one’s own peril.

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.” For what it’s worth, chainsaws don’t care what you believe, either.

The math behind this is complex, but from my limited understanding, and the explanations of the geeks who actually do understand the math, this is possible.

Scientists Claim to – Accidentally – Create a Warp Bubble

Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.

“To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told The Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble. “Hence the significance.”

Warp Bubble Theoretical
Theoretical Warp Bubble Structure: Image Credit LSI

THEORETICAL WARP DRIVES AND SCIENCE VISIONARIES

In 1994, Mexican Mathematician Miguel Alcubierre proposed the first mathematically valid solution to the warp drive. More specifically, he outlined a spacecraft propulsion system previously only envisioned in science fiction that can traverse the cosmos above the speed of light without violating currently accepted laws of physics.

That solution was lauded for its elegant mathematics, yet simultaneously derided for its use of theoretical materials and massive amounts of energy that appeared virtually impossible to engineer in any practical way.

Over a decade later, this theory underwent a major shift, when Dr. White, a then NASA-employed warp drive specialist and the founder of the highly respected Eagleworks laboratory, reworked Alcubierre’s original metric and put it into canonical form. This change in design dramatically reduced the exotic materials and energy requirements of the original concept, seemingly providing researchers and science fiction fans alike at least a glimmer of hope that a real-world warp drive may one day become a reality. It also resulted in the informal renaming of the original theoretical design, a concept now more commonly referred to as the “Alcubierre/White Warp Drive.”

Since then, The Debrief has covered a number of physicists and engineers taking their own stabs at designing a viable warp drive, including an entire group of international researchers working on a warp drive that requires no exotic matter. However, like Alcubierre and White before them, the warp concepts of these would-be visionaries all still remain theoretical in nature.

Now, it appears the situation has changed.

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Finally, a Fusion Reaction Has Generated More Energy Than Absorbed by The Fuel.

A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy.

For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule [78,000,000 watt hours – that the equivalent of producing 78 megawatts for one hour]  energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it.

Although there’s still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It’s a huge achievement.

Physicists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be submitting a paper for peer review.

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I briefly commented on this awhile back.
This is a better look into the flaws of the underlying ‘research’.

Fatal Flaw In Ph.D. Thesis On Second Amendment Suppressing First Amendment

The Atlantic has been on an anti-Second Amendment tear lately. After a couple of pieces by David Frum, which I’ve addressed before, they have an article (Archived) that employs the newfangled theory that the Second Amendment somehow threatens the First Amendment. We saw this in the ACLU amicus brief in the NYSRPA v. Bruen case, which Cam addressed recently.

This article goes one step further. It cites “research” by two parties to make broad claims about how open carry protests chill free speech. The crux of the article is as follows:

Some protests involving open carry firearms have resulted in violence. The presence of firearms at a protest causes some people to be scared. Due to this fear, they are unable to express their opinions freely. Therefore – you can guess where this is headed – open carry at protests must be ‘regulated’.

Lest we forget, this argument has already been employed in the Campus Carry debate, that concealed carrying of guns inside a classroom would somehow stifle discussions. There is no evidence that those fears materialized. Yet, that argument is being laundered and reused against open carry at public protests, with calls to “further study” the chilling effect of concealed carry.

The article states:

What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives. […] Diana Palmer, one of the authors of this article, conducted a study […] found that participants were far less likely to attend a protest, carry a sign, vocalize their views, or bring children to protests if they knew firearms would be present.

There are two underlying studies this article is based on. The first one is from Everytown/ACLED, and the second one is a Ph.D. dissertation by Diana Palmer, one of the authors of the article. Everytown’s research is shoddy; it has been taken apart thoroughly before. Their new “research” needs to be tackled, but I will focus on the Ph.D. dissertation, which you can download and look at yourself here.

The abstract of the dissertation states the following:

In this mixed-methods study, 1,205 participants were surveyed about their likelihood of engaging in First Amendment behaviors at a protest with and without firearms and asked to explain what factors they considered when selecting their answers. […] In the quantitative element of the study, differences in expressive behavior were analyzed in the condition with no firearms and the condition with firearms. The analysis showed that participants were less likely to engage in expressive behaviors when firearms were present.

The abstract only talks about public protest scenarios in which guns are either present or not present. I looked through the dissertation, and found that it lacks any questions on weapons that aren’t firearms. Participants were never asked what they would do if knives, swords, clubs, pepper spray, brass knuckles, bike locks, etc. would be present. Any chilling effect of non-firearms weapons on assembly is not considered in the dissertation.

Weapons aren’t the only things that people can react to negatively. Participants weren’t asked what they would do if there were head-to-toe incognito, masked protestors at an event. Anyone following the news knows that antifa mobs have been showing up at “protests” in all-black, covering their faces while violating journalists’ First Amendment right to record them. Likewise, would people show up to a protest if there were people wearing Klan hoods?

Another topic that wasn’t addressed is crowd density. Personally, I avoid crowds and wouldn’t be surprised if survey participants would factor in high crowd density as a deterrent… if they had been asked about it.

Lastly, the timing of a protest was not included in the surveys; there are people who avoid “protests” at 1 AM. Too bad the dissertation didn’t ask about that.

These are questions that should have been part of the research, and the Ph.D. advisor or members of the committee should have caught these misses. This is a fatal flaw, in my opinion, especially given what the dissertation lays out in conclusion:

The first recommendation is that the carrying of firearms at protests should be regulated separately from other forms of open carry.

Given all the important questions that were missed, I take objection to the singling out of open carry at protests. If it’s a matter of regulating open carry at protests with, say, having your gun unloaded, mag out, chamber flag in, that’s one thing. But I doubt that’s the sort of benign regulation the writers of The Atlantic piece are asking for.

Going back to the article in The Atlantic, the writers also want to study concealed carry:

Research thus far has focused on open display of firearms, but further study is needed to evaluate the public safety concerns that may still be present when protesters or counterprotesters bring concealed firearms to demonstrations.

Unfortunately, this looks like agenda-driven, or at a minimum, bias-distorted research to me. Watching the press amplify it is unfunny to say the least.

I’ve posted two of Professor Yamane’s articles here, and here that indicate he’s an ‘honest broker’ when it comes to his research. Seems some others have noticed it as well.

Wake Forest Professor Views Recent Gun Buying In Interesting Way

It seems that every time we see any research about guns, it’s focused on negative things. There’s very little research that seems to look at guns from a positive standpoint, and that is why a lot of gun rights advocates look at researches in an adversarial manner. After all, when you set yourself up in opposition to a deeply held principle, what do you expect?

That’s something that is going to play on people’s minds as researchers look at the surge in gun buying over the last two years. After all, more and more people are buying guns and a lot of folks want to know why.

A researcher at Wake Forest University, though, says he starts from a different place than many of his colleagues.

Sociology professor David Yamane is unique among social scientists in understanding American gun culture on its own terms, from the inside out, especially the normality of gun ownership and use for individuals with diverse religious, racial, gender, and sexual identities.…

Why are people buying more guns?

Over the past half-century, the center of gravity of America’s historic gun culture has evolved from hunting and recreational shooting to armed self-defense. This can be seen in the liberalization of concealed carry laws, the changes in gun advertisements, and in the many new products and services offered to satisfy the self-defense market.

Yamane isn’t wrong here. Whereas guns were once predominantly about hunting and plinking, now guns are focused primarily on self-defense. Hunting is still a large segment of the market, sure, but most hunters also buy self-defense weapons why a number of those focused on self-defense have little interest in hunting.

Interestingly, Yamane’s answer is devoid of a lot of what we typically hear. There’s no talk of fear or paranoia or racism in Yamane’s claim, that’s likely because Yamane starts at a different place when it comes to guns.

What makes your research on guns unique?

I have spent more than 10 years studying guns in America. I’m able to speak to individuals and organizations across the spectrum of opinions on guns. My work begins with the foundational premise that guns are normal and normal people use guns. This is a dramatic departure from standard social scientific approaches that view gun owners as deviant and focus exclusively on negative outcomes associated with guns such as crime, injury and death.

So, basically, Yamane admits what we already suspect, that most supposed gun researchers think we’re deviants to some degree and simply don’t care to look at how guns are beneficial.

He does things differently, which is why he’s not tripping over himself to make the case that a surge in gun buying is because of people being afraid of everything.

Now, I do think people being scared has driven a lot to buy guns. That’s not a controversial position in and of itself. Some may make the claim that it’s driven by racism–“Oh, you’re afraid of all those black people might come and kill you, aren’t you?”–but people being concerned for their own safety makes sense.

Yet without research showing that, I suspect Yamane isn’t interested in speculating.

Meanwhile, he also points out that while gun buying has increased year after year, violent crime rates fluctuate, showing that the prevalence of firearms alone simply cannot account for the violent crime rate being what it is year over year. There has to be more going on.

Frankly, he’s right and it’s nice to see someone in academia that doesn’t treat gun owners like villains.

Comment O’ The Day
Remember..
The Marxists have two main goals:
1. Destroying America
2. Replace her with a China style techno-fascist state.
Gotta see the big picture folks.
The Marxist Dems intend these results of their policies.

Businesses Leave and Crime Increases While Massachusetts Legislators Pass More Gun Control Laws.

A new study confirms Massachusetts gun control laws achieved “no effect” on reducing violent crime even though legislators promised they would.

Politicians earn support by promising constituents they’ll focus on a few key issues and delivering results. Antigun lawmakers in the Bay State achieved a rare trifecta-failure by curtailing voters’ Constitutional rights, eliminating hundreds of jobs and failing to make a dent on violent crime and enhancing public safety.

Predictable Results

Nearly 600 members of the public attended a July 2014 Massachusetts Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security on a massive gun control expansion considered by the legislature. Oddly, the proposal sought to ban modern sporting rifles (MSRs) that the state already banned in 1998. It also included a provision to implement rules allowing law enforcement to decide “may issue,” “suitability standards” regarding who can purchase not only handguns, but also shotguns and rifles, regardless of whether the buyer passes a NICS background check.

A month later, then-Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick signed the bill and Massachusetts House Speaker Democrat Robert DeLeo praised it, saying the package will “make Massachusetts one of the safest places in the world.”

At the time, Bay State Republican and Second Amendment advocate Rep. George Peterson said of the gun control package, he “didn’t find anything that will have an appreciable effect on gun violence. These are more restrictions on lawful gun owners.”

A new 2021 deep-dive study by researchers at American University proved Rep. Peterson clairvoyant, concluding that the gun control package has “not reduced gun violence and gun crime at all in Massachusetts.”

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“Although there has been no direct empirical evidence linking sexual dysfunction (SD) with gun ownership, speculation has been widespread and persistent for decades.” ?

That ‘speculation’ has actually been nothing more than Junior High School ‘Boy’s room’ level insults from those who have nothing better to use in their anti-gun/anti-civil rights screeds.
That these researchers went to the trouble to finally dump it out on the trash heap of ideas where it should have been the first time it was put forth is to be appreciated.

Sexual Dysfunction and Gun Ownership in America: When Hard Data Meet a Limp Theory

 

 

Do tell……………

New study finds little effect from Massachusetts gun control measures on violent crimes

A new study from American University found that the tightened gun-control measures that went into effect in Massachusetts six years ago had little effect on the violent crime rate in the state, raising questions about enforcement of these laws.
“Gun violence remains at the forefront of the public policy debate when it comes to enacting new or strengthening existing gun legislation in the United States,” said Janice Iwama, assistant professor of justice, law, and criminology at AU, who conducted the study. “Yet the political polarization and relatively limited scholarly research on guns and gun violence make it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to enact and implement legislation that addresses the public health and safety issues associated with gun violence.”
The study, published in Justice Quarterly, used modeling and FBI data from 2006 to 2016 to examine the impact of the 2015 gun law on crimes including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
The law, enacted in the wake of the Sandy Hook, Conn., school shooting by former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, paved the way for the creation of a web portal for gun dealers to check the validity of a firearm license and track sales and transfers of firearms. It also tightened requirements for background checks on the sale of firearms and licensing procedures.
Iwama, who authored the study, noted that the entire country, including the Bay State, experienced a drop in crime since the 1990s. Still, Massachusetts had 287,000 violent crimes from 2006 to 2016, including “198,402 aggravated assaults, 70,361 robberies, 19,107 rapes, and 1,698 instances of murder or non-negligent man-slaughter.”
About 1% to 5% of adult residents in each Massachusetts county have a firearms license.
She found that a one percentage point rise in denied licenses and denied licenses due to unsuitability increased robberies by 7.3% and 8.9%, respectively, after the new law took effect. For every other type of violent crime, including rape, murder and aggravated assault, she found no statistically significant change.
Iwama suggested the issue could be caused by uneven enforcement of the laws across counties, an overall lag in enforcement and/or because residents are obtaining firearms in neighboring states with looser gun laws. She recommended that policymakers revisit the legislation to ensure it’s being property applied and enforced.

the vaccinated superspread hypothesis
assessing the riddle of more recovered, more vaccinated, and more dying despite a lower CFR variant

there has been a strange riddle in the covid data of late.

we have a lower CFR variant of the disease that has become predominant. delta has roughly 1/3 the case fatality rate of prior variants (like alpha)

far more people have acquired immunity from having had and recovered from covid. this immunity is long lasting and extremely effective. (much more so than vaccines)

high risk cohorts were significantly reduced last year. there is less “dry tinder” now.

we have FAR more people vaccinated now. it’s 50-90% in many places and in many high risk groups. last year it was zero.

and yet in many of the high vaccine uptake places, we’re seeing deaths from covid (and excess mortality) rise to levels ABOVE last year.

this has led many to posit that vaccines not only don’t work, but that they make you worse.

but on an individual level, this does not appear to be true. (though there is quite a lot of evidence that vaccines induce higher risk in the two weeks post administration and that this is being accounted for dishonestly, added to the “unvaccinated” butcher’s bill, and artificially enhancing reported VE.

BUT, even if we control for this, vaccines are showing efficacy in preventing deaths among the vaccinated. it’s more like 50% than the 90%+ being claimed, but VE against death in the 50%’s should still be showing BIG community effects with so many people in the high risk groups vaccinated.

but, on a societal level, it’s not. we’re seeing breakouts to new seasonal highs vs last year and epidemics in covid death rapidly following vaccination campaigns. (MORE)

all else equal even without vaccines, we’d expect to see attenuation in covid deaths for the reasons laid out above. instead we see acceleration.

the case rate in covid would need to be 3X last year to drive equivalent deaths and higher than that to show excess. but, it’s nothing like that, especially once you control for testing levels.

this is showing up in excess deaths as well as covid deaths, so the signal looks real.

the data has caused a lot of hand wringing and confusion.

grab a seat, because i have an idea to inject into the debate, i sincerely hope that i am wrong, and i suspect a fair few folks are not going to like hearing it, but it’s the best fit i can find for the data.

so here we go:

the current surge in covid deaths is caused by the vaccinated.

the covid vaccines are extremely leaky and may well accelerate contracting and carrying covid.

they allow for very high viral loads to go unnoticed and generate a new and severe asymptomatic spread vector to where none existed before.

the high viral loads lead to greater contagion. they may lead to greater severity (but this data is iffy and contested)

vaccine campaigns cause superspread events because vaccination leads to a 2 week window of 40-100% more covid risk that then gets counted as “unvaccinated” because the definitions are bad.

this combination makes those vaccinated with one dose or more into superspread bombs.

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Pew: ‘Key Facts About Americans and Guns’ Revealing

A recent analysis of polling data by the Pew Research Center shows personal protection “tops the list of reasons why gun owners say they own a firearm.”

This would certainly square with what a 20-something Seattle resident—a transplant from Florida about five years ago—told John Carlson, the morning drive time talk host at KVI-AM in an interesting interview about why he felt the need to arm himself and take some firearms training, and get a concealed pistol license. The young man’s name is Wyatt, and he is one of nearly 98,000 residents of Washington’s King County, which encompasses Seattle, to have an active CPL, according to the most recent data from the state Department of Licensing.

Wyatt told Carlson he’s been a witness or intended victim of crime over the past couple of years, and said he’s’ had to draw his legally-carried sidearm more than once on knife-armed thugs.

So it is no wonder why he’s part of what may be a growing number of Americans now packing hardware. The Pew story referred to a survey conducted in June which revealed “Men are more likely than women to say they own a gun (39% vs. 22%). And 41% of adults living in rural areas report owning a firearm, compared with about 29% of those living in the suburbs and two-in-ten living in cities.”

But in Seattle, where there have been at least 32 homicides so far this year, and other cities experiencing increasing crime rates in the 19th month of COVID-19, that could change.

Another revelation in the Pew report is that 48 percent of Americans “see gun violence as a very big problem.” By why single out guns for demonization? In Wyatt’s case, he was almost a victim of “knife violence,” except that nobody in the media ever calls it that. For some reason, guns get not-so-special treatment when used in a violent crime.

Pew based its conclusion on research from April which showed 48 percent of survey respondents think gun-related crime is a problem.

The same April survey revealed 53 percent of Americans “favor stricter gun laws,” but that’s a decline since 2019, when it was 60 percent. Could this have anything to do with the fact that the past 19 months have seen an estimated 8 million people purchase guns for the first time? Going through the process—depending upon the jurisdiction—can be an eye-opener for people who previously thought guns were too easily obtained. The Washington Examiner recently reported that the pandemic and rising murder numbers could change gun politics for a long time to come.

According to Pew, “Republicans are currently more likely to say gun laws should be less strict (27%) than stricter (20%)…Today, a large majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners (81%) say gun laws should be stricter, though this share has declined slightly since 2019 (down from 86%).”

Pew has also found Americans are split when asked if restricting gun ownership would result in fewer mass shootings, with 49 percent contending there would be a reduction, and 42 percent saying it would make no difference. Nine percent think there would be more mass shootings if it was harder for people to legally buy a gun.

To be frank, this kind of corruption appears to be systemic in ‘higher academia’ and not just about gun control research, but about all research.
When you see articles about the vast problem with the ‘ lack of reproducibility in research’, here, here, and here, this shouldn’t be shocking. It’s just more of the standard operational crap-for-brains, sloth and avarice.

Anti-Gunners Reusing Research Wasting Taxpayer Money Attacking the 2A

The Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government published a policy brief promising “Policy Solutions to Address Mass Shootings.” The Rockefeller Institute is a think tank within the State University of New York system and founded by the governors of northeastern states to offset the supposed lack of research from federal agencies. In practice, the Consortium has provided rudimentary original “analysis” and repackaged existing research largely funded by…federal agencies.

The “Policy Solutions to Address Mass Shootings” brief was written by Michael Rocque, Grant Duwe, Michael Siegel, James Alan Fox, Max Goder-Reiser, and Emma E. Fridel. It draws exclusively upon a paper written by Rocque, Duwe, Siegel, Fox, and Goder-Reiser with funding provided by the National Institute of Justice. Fridel joined the original paper’s authors to write the policy brief outlining the findings from the original paper in a slick format.

That original paper includes this as the first line in the “policy and research implications” in the conclusion section: “Because of the cross-sectional nature of this study, we cannot definitively conclude that implementing a specific law would lead to a change in the incidence or severity of mass public shootings.” The Consortium policy brief is not quite as circumspect, instead of presenting the key findings of the original paper alongside an imaginative, but not necessarily realistic, rationale for the findings.

Other research cited in the policy brief included the embarrassing and negligent misuse of data for an “analysis” of gun laws and another that seemingly contradicts the claims in the research brief. The author of the second example, Dr. Emma Fridel, is a co-author of the research brief.
The most important note in the research brief is presented in the top right corner of page two: “This project was supported by grant #2018-75-CX-0025, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice.”

Similar disclaimers appear on most of the research presented on the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium website. The DOJ, the CDC, and the NIH all funded published research that is now available on the website of a Research Consortium supposedly founded because such research was not federally funded. Maybe the governors of northeast states did not think to check if the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a division of NIH, had funded any research related to gun policy (it has, and it’s available on the Research Consortium website) before launching the Consortium.

Who would?

Then again, maybe it was never truly about research. Maybe it’s about the optics of reposting and repackaging research and camouflaging the anti-gun wish list as credible. That seems more likely.

BLUF:
Anti-gun researches will continue to use flawed methodology and bad data as long as a fawning media and gun control establishment continue to fuel any “research” with the “right” conclusion

How Anti-Gun Research Works

The objective world mistrusts most gun policy research because it’s clear the objective is to produce an anti-gun outcome rather than honest analysis. Politicians and professional activists claim the mantle of evidence but will ignore any findings that threaten their anti-gun agenda.

Anti-gun politicians continue to advocate for policies that the very researchers they champion have contradicted, if not found to be ineffective. Researchers and activists cherry-pick data, but they also cherry-pick which findings to use – even from a single study. Can you imagine if the same low threshold for credibility was applied to pro-gun findings?

Let’s try an exercise. Vermont – one of the safest states in the nation, one that had Permitless Carry for centuries – enacted a magazine capacity restriction in 2018. Let’s look at the violent crime rate in Vermont and the U.S using data from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. The national violent crime rate decreased from 2018 to 2019 but the rate in Vermont increased – and even increased more than it had from 2017 to 2018.

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Just to point out; The majority of the Covid shots are mRNA (memory RNA) injections that cause the cell to write RNA sequences that produce the Covid ‘spike’ protein…………

New discovery shows human cells can write RNA sequences into DNA
Date:
June 11, 2021
Source:
Thomas Jefferson University
Summary:
In a discovery that challenges long-held dogma in biology, researchers show that mammalian cells can convert RNA sequences back into DNA, a feat more common in viruses than eukaryotic cells.

Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed cell. That same class of machines, called polymerases, also build RNA messages, which are like notes copied from the central DNA repository of recipes, so they can be read more efficiently into proteins. But polymerases were thought to only work in one direction DNA into DNA or RNA. This prevents RNA messages from being rewritten back into the master recipe book of genomic DNA. Now, Thomas Jefferson University researchers provide the first evidence that RNA segments can be written back into DNA, which potentially challenges the central dogma in biology and could have wide implications affecting many fields of biology.

“This work opens the door to many other studies that will help us understand the significance of having a mechanism for converting RNA messages into DNA in our own cells,” says Richard Pomerantz, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Thomas Jefferson University. “The reality that a human polymerase can do this with high efficiency, raises many questions.” For example, this finding suggests that RNA messages can be used as templates for repairing or re-writing genomic DNA.

The work was published June 11th in the journal Science Advances.

Together with first author Gurushankar Chandramouly and other collaborators, Dr. Pomerantz’s team started by investigating one very unusual polymerase, called polymerase theta. Of the 14 DNA polymerases in mammalian cells, only three do the bulk of the work of duplicating the entire genome to prepare for cell division. The remaining 11 are mostly involved in detecting and making repairs when there’s a break or error in the DNA strands. Polymerase theta repairs DNA, but is very error-prone and makes many errors or mutations. The researchers therefore noticed that some of polymerase theta’s “bad” qualities were ones it shared with another cellular machine, albeit one more common in viruses — the reverse transcriptase. Like Pol theta, HIV reverse transcriptase acts as a DNA polymerase, but can also bind RNA and read RNA back into a DNA strand.

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