Social Sciences, Garbage Gun Research, and the ‘Replication Crisis’

I’ve talked a fair bit about how bad gun research is when it comes out of either academia or the activist bunch at places like Everytown. Cam started it back in 2022. The next year, I talked about self-censorship in academia, where research that doesn’t conform to the narrative is tossed so that the researchers don’t get hate from their colleagues.

All of this contributes to the lack of trust anyone should have toward research, especially when it comes to firearm policy.

However, over at NRA-ILA’s website, they bring up another aspect of that, and that’s the replication crisis in social sciences.

Gun rights supporters know that civilian disarmament advocates have long employed dubious social “science”/public “health” research in their mission to strip Americans of their Second Amendment rights. Worse, these political actors insist that taxpayers fund these attacks.

Last week, NRA-ILA pointed to new research showing that the social “sciences” exhibit woeful, and increasing, political bias. Compounding this problem, this week, a large team of researchers published another study showing that roughly half of social “science” research cannot be replicated. Replication is vital to determining whether a study’s conclusions are in fact valid.

The item is titled Investigating the replicability of the social and behavioural sciences, and was published April 1 in the journal Nature. An article in the journal Science, titled Across the social sciences, half of research doesn’t replicate, summarized the findings.

Describing the replication research project, Science explained.

Called Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE), the effort investigated more than 100 papers published in dozens of leading journals in business, economics, education, political science, psychology, and sociology. The replication success rate—49% for the 164 papers evaluated, reported today in Nature—is consistent with findings from previous studies in individual fields such as psychology, suggesting the problem is pervasive in the social sciences.

Citing a scientist interviewed for the piece, the Science item noted,

Improving repeatability requires reforms in professional evaluations and funding practices to incentivize researchers to prioritize rigor and quality over the quantity of papers they publish, Cobey says. “Answering the ongoing questions of the credibility of research requires a cultural change in how we conduct research.”

The problems highlighted by this research project will be familiar to those aware of a 2015 study published in Science that detailed the results of a four-year effort to improve the accuracy of psychological science. A team of 270 scientists led by University of Virginia Professor Brian Nosek attempted to replicate 98 studies published in some of psychology’s most prestigious journals by conducting 100 attempts at replication. In the end, according to a Science article accompanying the study, “only 39% of the studies could be replicated unambiguously.” The episode, in part, led to what has become known as the replication crisis.

Understand that this is a well-known phenomenon, not some fringe thing the writer locked onto in order to discredit gun research and the resulting policy proposals that come from it.

No, the replication crisis is well-documented and well-discussed in academia and the mainstream media. It’s a legitimate problem beyond public policy because, if we’re going to learn anything, we need to have data that can be found in similar studies. That’s how you confirm that the research is valid.

For example, take the claims about cold fusion. Scientists said they did it. No one has apparently been able to replicate it, though some conspiracy theories are saying they have. Maybe, maybe not. The point is, though, without proof it works, no one is taking cold fusion as something that works here and now.

But when researchers make some claim about gun control working, or they conduct some experiment that suggests people can’t be trusted with guns or whatever, this gets latched onto and is then used to push gun control policies.

The issue is that the research can’t be repeated.

Even when they have the same data, researchers come to wildly different conclusions about what they’re seeing, which is a vital point, because often, that data doesn’t explicitly say a damn thing. It’s the “researchers'” own biases coming out in their conclusions, which again, isn’t repeatable because not everyone has the same biases.

Which would be fine to a point, because exploration is part of scientific research. You get stuff wrong until you can get it right. I’m fine with people screwing up because it can still help us learn.

The problem is that no one is skeptical about this research except for us, and that’s likely because we have a stake in the matter. For anti-gun lawmakers, it doesn’t really matter if they know the research is untrustworthy or not. They’re going to run with it because it advances the narrative they want, and they’ll ignore any evidence to the contrary.

Even as some lament the replication crisis publicly, even.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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