re: Obama's CDC study on Firearms.

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John Lott has studied the same topic exhaustively, in far more detail and has continued to update his research as more data has come available and has drawn the opposite conclusion. Gun-control advocates have created a cottage industry in discrediting Lott but they have never been able to argue against the data or his methodologies.

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quote:

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This Article has reviewed a significant amount of evidence  from a wide variety of international sources. Each individual  portion of evidence is subject to cavil—at the very least the  general objection that the persuasiveness of social scientific  evidence  cannot  remotely  approach  the  persuasiveness  of  conclusions in the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal  more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on  that mantra.149 To bear that burden would at the very least  require showing that a large number of nations with more  guns have more death and that nations that have imposed  stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions  in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are  not observed when a large number of nations are compared  across the world. 

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quote:

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Over a decade ago, Professor Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington undertook an extensive, statistically sophisticated study comparing areas in the United States and Canada to  determine whether Canada’s more restrictive policies had better  contained criminal violence. When he published his results it was  with the admonition:

If you are surprised by [our] finding[s], so [are we]. [We] did  not begin this research with any intent to “exonerate” handguns, but there it is—a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us  where not to aim public health resources.150  

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