The bad doctor is making the news because he donated $1 million of his own money to continue anti-gun research, this is because Republicans are stopping the CDC from funding junk science. This is good, I like it when the private sector does what they like with their money instead of mine. Reading the interview, I found this interesting admission:
Has your research ever made gun control advocates uncomfortable?
I did a gun show study. When I started crunching numbers on gun show sales, and looking at the surveys, I came to realize — as interesting as this is, gun shows themselves are not a big part of the problem. I felt obligated to add this into my report.
Before we released the study, I had a conference call with a bunch of organizations that I knew were interested in working to close the gun show loophole, and I told them what we were saying. That was a very uncomfortable conversation. People got very angry. It was going to make it more difficult for them to do what they wanted, which was to close the gun show loophole.
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Source: http://dexter.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/meet-the-doctor-who-gave-1-million-of-his-own-money-to-research-guns_dee62e3f
The rest of the article is the usual anti-gun crap you hear all the time, the interviewer asked a smart question, and Wintemute repeated propaganda.
One recent study from Harvard researchers found that there were lower gun death rates in states with more restrictive gun laws. The study got a lot of press. But you’ve been very critical of its conclusions. What’s wrong with this kind of analysis?
Almost all the effects they had seen from mortality in the study had to do with suicide. But the laws were largely intended to prevent homicide.
Number two: Correlation is not causation. Rates of gun deaths are lower where rates of gun ownership are lower. That’s true. We know that. It’s also easier to pass laws like this where the rates of gun ownership are lower. There aren’t that many guns around, there isn’t that large a constituency of gun owners.
States with lots of laws have lower firearm death rates, but the fact that two things occur at the same time does not mean that one of those things caused the other.
How does he explain all the shootings in Chicago? Rates of legal gun ownership are clearly low in the anti-gun states, which allowed the gang bangers to do their worst until a cop or another hoodlum shoots them.
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