In taking over the project, they committed one of the most heinous sins against rational discourse ever seen. When the Bradys did their scorecard, they at least documented how they graded alleged favorability of various gun control laws. Their system was nothing more than scoring highly the laws they liked (there was never any rigor in matching laws to efficacy). But they were honest enough to allow anyone to peek under the sheets. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence was not so burdened (perhaps due to the often commented-upon lack of intersection between lawyers and ethics). Despite my asking for their criteria twice, using different email addresses, they have refused to share their scorecard rubric likewise, when former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords merged her Americans for Responsible Solutions with the law center to create today’s misinformation factory. There is little doubt (as you will soon see) that their approach is slightly less meaningless than a mugger’s claim of innocence. The airbrushed image that Giffords Law Center paints is that strong gun control laws lead to less death. On a professionally styled and illustrated web page, they present their rankings of states by the “strength” of each state’s gun laws, and the magically misleading “gun deaths” statistics (which we have been debunking for nearly 20 years, and which we recently reviewed). The problems herein are a monument to agitprop. As noted above, the scoring rubric is unpublished and likely a cherry-picked charade. This is due to “substitution of means” whereby a seriously depressed or psychotic person finds a way to die (poison, hanging, suffocation, etc.).Cross-sectional and time-series studies show no correlation between firearm availability and successful suicides.Scorecard schema aside, we encounter the first problem, which is that the law center appears to include all forms of gun deaths – legal interventions, justifiable homicides, etc. Hence, suicides do not figure into gun policy at all, and should never been aggregated into data for the evaluation of gun access policy. ![]() More appropriate metrics focus on specific categories of mayhem, such as violent crime.
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