Whenever I review “studies” touted by groups like Brady, Everytown/MDA, CSGV, and VPC I cringe at the level of statistical manipulation and dishonesty presented as scholarly fact. As the old saying goes, special interest groups use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.
A few months ago Daniel Webster published a “study” attempting to demonstrate that Connecticut’s FOID program had the effect of lowering the suicide rate over a specific time period. I spent a few hours looking over the raw data and double-checking his math with Excel. I discovered that his study results completely fell apart if you adjusted the time period under observation. He studied 1995-2013, and excluded 2014 data. Why did he exclude 2014? I don’t know as the data was available well before he published. But I do know that if you included 2014 as the end point, the population adjusted suicide rate in Connecticut actually increased on average .53% per year or if using a geometric mean by .23% per year. That’s just over the life of the FOID program. If you go back even further, you realize that the biggest drops in Connecticut’s suicide rate came a few years before the FOID program was implemented and the biggest increase in the suicide rate came after the implementation of FOID. Now, I wouldn’t claim that the FOID program had the effect of increasing the overall suicide rate. Correlation does not imply causation.
I think if someone called out Daniel Webster on his “study”, he would probably argue that his calculation was only based on the firearm rate of suicide, and the overall rate of suicide should be ignored. Why? Does that make any sense unless your sole purpose is to vilify guns and gun ownership?
The raw data from Everytown’s study is unavailable. The best we have to work with is their tally sheet, which is useless on its own. http://everytownresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/MassShootingsBackgroundChecks-Appendix-1.pdf
What does this data set tell us about UBCs and the population adjusted murder rate?
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state#nat1970
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