I vaguely recall a time when I started with an assumption that “study” might be valid. Although, when I began focusing on “gun violence” studies, I rapidly did a 180 and assumed they’d be bogus.
Like this one.
Child and Teen Firearm Mortality in the U.S. and Peer Countries
Firearms recently became the number one cause of death for children in the United States, surpassing motor vehicle deaths and those caused by other injuries.
We examine how gun violence and other types of firearm deaths among children and teens in the United States compares to rates in similarly large and wealthy countries.
[…]
we compare fatality rates and disability estimates for people ages 1 through 19. (Since estimates were not available for children ages 1-17 alone, young adults ages 18 and 19 are grouped with children for the purposes of this brief).
I never made it past the ranking chart.
First, the “children” include 18 and 19 year old adults. Their excuse is that they were too damned lazy to go to source data, and only relied on databases that lump in adults. By the way, KFF, the federal standard for research on children is “TWO YEARS TO TWELVE YEARS.”
Now the ranking chart. Look at it closely. The rankings are by raw number of deaths, not rate per population. Do you know what all those countries with fewer deaths than America have in common?
They all have much smaller populations than the US. Japan is the second largest, with less than half of America’s population. Figuring rates would have provided a far better comparison. But again, that would require these lazy bastards to look up the “child” population numbers for each country and doing a little math.
Lazy, yes. But there’s also another likely explanation for this BS “study.” It’s the rabidly anti-gun Kaiser Family Foundation. This was meant as pure propaganda, why bother putting in a lot of work on something pushing feelz and not facts.
Besides, if they used facts, it might not support the narrative.
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