The results of a ‘study’ often mirror the politics of who’s paying for it<\/p>\n
That Kaiser Gun Study The Media Love Is Garbage<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s become virtually impossible to find reliable data or polling on gun violence these days. A new Kaiser Family Foundation\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0being shared by virtually\u00a0every<\/a>\u00a0major<\/a>\u00a0media<\/a>\u00a0outlet<\/a>\u00a0this week offers us a good example of why. The headlines report that \u201c1 in 5 adults\u201d in the United States claim that a \u201cfamily member\u201d has been \u201ckilled\u201d by a gun. And, let\u2019s just say, that\u2019s a highly dubious claim.<\/p>\n There are 333 million people\u00a0living<\/a>\u00a0in the United States, and somewhere around 259 million of them are over the age of 18. Twenty percent of those adults equals nearly 52 million people. There were\u00a0more than<\/a>\u00a040,000 gun deaths in 2022, and around 20,000 of them were homicides \u2014 a slight dip from a Covid-year historic high that followed decades of lows. So, according to Kaiser\u2019s polling, every victim of gun violence in the past few years had hundreds, if not thousands, of \u201cfamily members.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, to be fair, we can\u2019t really run the numbers because Kaiser doesn\u2019t define its terms or parameters. For example, what constitutes a \u201cfamily member\u201d? Is your second cousin a family member? Because if so, that creates quite the nexus of people. What about your stepbrother\u2019s second cousin? Or how about your uncle who died in Iraq? Or how about that grandfather you never met who committed suicide in 1968? Kaiser could have asked people about their \u201cimmediate\u201d relatives. The opacity is the point.<\/p>\n Then again, you can always spot a misleading firearms study by checking if the authors conflate suicides and murders. Kaiser does. The underlying problems leading to a homicide or a suicide are typically very different. So are the solutions. There are numerous countries with virtually no private gun ownership that have persistently high suicide rates. There isn\u2019t any other societal problem in which Kaiser wouldn\u2019t stress the distinction between criminality and mental health struggles.<\/p>\n But even if we count suicides, the claim is fantastical. As are many of the others. If we trust\u00a0this poll<\/a>, we would have to accept that around 50 million Americans were personally threatened with a gun. And that 54 percent of American adults \u2014 which can be extrapolated to mean\u00a0140 million<\/em>\u00a0adults \u2014 have personally or have a family member who has witnessed a shooting, been threatened by a gun, or been injured or killed by one. (Another 28 percent, or 72 million people, contend they have carried a gun in self-defense \u2014 which is also exceedingly unlikely.)<\/p>\n Kaiser\u2019s \u201ckey findings\u201d highlight many issues tied to anti-gun activist talking points. In the middle of polling, Kaiser conveniently switches up the definition of an \u201cadult\u201d from 18 and older to over 19, so it can regurgitate the claim that firearms are the leading cause of death among children. Kaiser wonders if your \u201chealth care provider\u201d has talked to you about guns or gun safety. Did you know, Kaiser asks, that 6 in 10 parents with guns in their households say a gun is stored in the same location as ammunition?<\/p>\n What Kaiser doesn\u2019t mention in its press-friendly\u00a0\u201ckey findings\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and no media piece I\u2019ve read mentions \u2014 is that 82 percent of those polled feel \u201cvery\u201d or \u201csomewhat safe\u201d from gun violence in their own neighborhoods. Only 18 percent of Americans say they worry about gun violence on a daily or almost daily basis, while 43 percent say they worry about it \u201crarely\u201d or \u201cnever.\u201d So, you\u2019re telling me, half of American adults have personally experienced gun violence themselves or toward someone in their family, but less than 20 percent worry about it often?<\/p>\n There are numerous other problems with Kaiser\u2019s findings. Perhaps the most important, though, is the sample size. Granted, I\u2019m no polling expert, but I suspect that the self-reported thoughts of 1,271 people \u2014 answering a bunch of poorly defined questions about a highly emotional and politically charged issue \u201conline and by telephone\u201d \u2014 should not be relied on with any certitude. And yet, there isn\u2019t a single establishment media reporter writing about the report that exhibits a hint of skepticism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The results of a ‘study’ often mirror the politics of who’s paying for it That Kaiser Gun Study The Media Love Is Garbage It\u2019s become virtually impossible to find reliable data or polling on gun violence these days. A new Kaiser Family Foundation\u00a0report\u00a0being shared by virtually\u00a0every\u00a0major\u00a0media\u00a0outlet\u00a0this week offers us a good example of why. The … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deceit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91893,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91892\/revisions\/91893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}