Researcher’s Source Shows Nature of Anti-Gun Echo Chamber

I’m not exactly interested in what anti-gun researchers claim to “find.” We know the “research” is garbage, and even when the research isn’t manipulated, there’s reason to believe that any findings that might be considered “pro-gun” will never see the light of day.

But, unfortunately, most people aren’t aware of these problems. They swallow what the so-called researchers are peddling, and then they repeat those claims uncritically.

And if we didn’t already know the research had major problems, we have what Lee Williams just reported as well.

Michael L. Nance, MD, is a very busy man.

He is chief of the Division of Pediatric General, Thoracic, and Fetal Surgery, and director of the Pediatric Trauma Program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which is known as “CHOP.”

Nance has also been called both an associate and an investigator for CHOP’s Center for Violence Prevention, which is almost violently anti-gun.

The Center for Violence Prevention publicly supports wild anti-gun policies such as mandatory child-access laws, universal background checks, strict limits on “assault-style weaponry,” court-ordered firearm storage laws and, of course, more funding for firearm-related research, which of course would be paid directly to the Center for Violence Prevention.

Nance has written scores of stories on what he believes are the perils of guns and gun ownership, including 2020’s “Most Mass Shootings Occur Within a Mile of a School or a Place Where Children Live, Learn and Play.”

“Firearms are the second leading cause of trauma-related death in children in our Trauma Centers,” Nance said in the news release announcing his work. “Our findings highlight the sheer extent of the problem and show how closely mass shootings are tied to our communities, and especially to the places where children learn and play.”

The story, for which Nance was the main author, raises the question of how his group defines a mass shooting. After all, the FBI defines a mass shooting as an event where four or more people are murdered.

But Nance’s press release states his team uses a different definition, which they got from a cringe-worthy anti-gun group.

“The researchers defined mass shootings as events involving four or more people injured or killed by a firearm in a single setting, using data from the 2019 Gun Violence Archive,” Nance’s story states.

The Gun Violence Archive?

That’s right. The good old Gun Violence Archive.

See, what happens is kind of this echo chamber effect where someone creates a “database” like the Gun Violence Archive so as to inflate the number of things like mass shootings by redefining it in a way that will include a host of other incidents, then someone like Nance walks in and not just gives the GVA credibility–they can say, “look at all this researcher we’re cited in! We’re definitely legit!”–but continues to misuse the data in order to reach a foregone conclusion.

Of course, GVA’s data includes mostly gang-related shootings, which happen in regular neighborhoods. That means they’re going to be within a mile of where kids learn and/or play, for example, but that’s kind of the point. Using GVA’s numbers gives one a very skewed perspective on what is actually happening in our communities.

That, I argue, is the point.

It’s not about finding the truth; it’s about creating a system that can reference itself as needed in order to try and push for gun control while pretending they’re just going where the data leads.

Nance is far from the only researcher who references the GVA. He’s just really loud and really annoying about his work, but I’ve seen others who do the same. 

And it’s going to keep going because this system has just enough independence–they are actually separate entities, they just share a common goal–that they can deflect criticism.

That’s what we’re up against.

Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points.

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