Over the years, I’ve not hidden my disdain for academia. Trying to do so would be like trying to hide Melissa McCarthy under a sock. It’s just not going to happen. And, to be fair to me, it’s not like academia has done particularly well for itself when it comes to guns and gun rights. We’ve covered it aplenty, and we’ll keep on doing so.
But a couple of recent stories have come up about research that, well, didn’t suck.
Let’s start with one earlier today. This one found that unsafe storage laws — they call them safe storage, but they’re not — do little to nothing to get people to secure their firearms, while education does more. That’s interesting because it’s basically saying that a popular bit of gun control, one that even many who claim to be pro-gun like, simply doesn’t work. It accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Then we had one at the end of August that was interesting in a similar way. It looked at why people left guns in cars, and the reason was gun laws.
What’s fascinating about this is that history tells us this isn’t normal. In fact, there’s reason to believe that most studies that didn’t toe the official line in academia were suppressed by the researchers. The claim was that if they didn’t, they’d be hounded by their colleagues for failing to do so. No one forced them to do so directly, but the heckler’s veto accomplished the same thing.
And William English caught hell back in 2024 for not toeing the academic line. He used all the standard protocols and approved methods, came up with a finding that was inconvenient for anti-gunners, and was lambasted for months, attacked in the media, and otherwise called everything but a decent human being.
Now, we’ve got two different studies just a couple of weeks apart that have taken a, admittedly mild, pro-gun position in its findings. Guns get stolen out of cars because people are forced to disarm to enter certain businesses or buildings. People don’t secure guns despite laws that are supposed to force the issue. Neither of these look good for the people who support the laws in question.
For those who opposed them, it’s damn near exactly what we said would happen.
We’ve known for a while that there was a correlation between spots known for a lot of gun thefts and gun-free zones. We knew that laws wouldn’t suddenly make irresponsible people decide to be responsible, especially when laws like murder don’t seem to stop some people from doing stuff.
So does this mean that academia is waking up and starting to try and do actual research?
Let’s not get carried away. There’s still going to be a lot of bad research out there that is created specifically to advance a cause, and it won’t all be put out by Everytown or Giffords. Some will be from the University of Who Gives a Flip. It’ll look legit, even if it’s not, and those are the studies that will get the national attention.
Even if we’re getting trickles like what we’ve seen the last couple of weeks, it’s not going to mean all that much. After all, it’s not like these two studies have shown up many places, right? That’s not a topic of conversation around the water cooler or anything like that, while something from Everytown gets national headlines.
But I do welcome academia to the pursuit of truth, if that’s what’s happening here. It’s not easy to do what’s right, but it’s always right to do it.
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