LonelyMachines

Garen Wintemute is at it again. For those of you just joining us, he's a doctor at the University of California Davis Center who made his mark turning the gun-control debate from a political issue into one of perceived public health back in the early 1990's. This week, he published a study entitled Inside Gun Shows: What goes on When Everybody Thinks Nobody's Watching . He was assisted by the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, which received $175,000 from the Joyce Foundation (pdf) this year for "Gun Violence" research. As is to be expected, the "research" here consists almost entirely of take-my-word-for-it anecdotes.  The recovering academic in me took immediate notice of the fact that there are very few citations or statistics presented, and that many of those are self-referential ( 1 ).

I've been subject to some truly absurd lines of conversation over the last few months, some of which are truly troubling. Yesterday, I was approached by a meek middle-aged sort. He asked me, without preamble, "which handgun calibers will pierce body armor?" There's no way I'm answering that, and he seemed a bit miffed when I told him so. Tough. You don't go asking strangers that kind of thing out of the blue. It's rude, and it's dangerous. Let's get a couple of things straight. The Revolution is not on our doorstep, and frankly, if you're asking stupid questions like that, you're not going to be fighting it anyway.

The sky is not falling, people. Really. So, H.R. 45 has been proposed and sent to a House committee for review. Big whoop. So does Carolyn McCarthy's revised Assault Weapons Ban. Every year, like clockwork, she throws it out there, and every year it withers on the vine. This is no different.