The New York Times may be notoriously anti-gun, but they don’t talk about it enough to justify me paying for a subscription. There was a story recently that almost made me consider it. While it was behind a paywall, it was about a professor who was supposedly a favorite of the nebulous and notorious “gun lobby.”
I figured someone else would pick it up and I’d get a glimpse at the attack. Well, nothing like that every dropped in my feed, at least until I was looking at what all news there was to talk about for today.
What was weird is that the piece I finally saw wasn’t from the Washington Post, the LA Times, or anyone else like that, but from the NRA defending the professor in question.
For the crime of running a huge survey on defensive gun use in the U.S. that was not forced into the narrative structure of today’s gun-control activism, William English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, has been subpoenaed, attacked in The New York Times and by many other “mainstream” outlets and, basically, pilloried in order to, as he put it inThe Wall Street Journal, “warn off other academics thinking of doing similar research, and to influence courts where states are losing on the merits.”
English supervised the 2021 National Firearms Survey. Data from the survey of 54,000 American adults estimated that citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; and, indeed, the survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired.”
To gun-control activists in politics and the media, this finding had to be marginalized, shunned, cancelled, and chased from polite society. They don’t want people to know that law-abiding Americans do need their freedom.
Them downplaying the research isn’t overly shocking. Some would argue that we do the same with all the research trying to justify gun control.
Because we do.
We just tend to have an easier time because so much of the research produced on the subject is so incredibly flawed. Meanwhile, they don’t have much experience doing it because, well, researchers have an annoying tendency to only release data that advances an anti-gun narrative.
This fact has always fascinated me. The laws of probability suggest that we should at least get a smattering of pro-gun results from unbiased research, even if gun control is actually beneficial. Science is generally predictive, but there’s a lot of ways social sciences are trickier to get right.
We almost never see it.
A while back, I touched on why that might be.
In addition to biased research, we also have a problem of self-censorship in science. People get results that run contrary to the prevailing opinion and rather than be eviscerated in debate, they just quietly decide not to public.
But there’s more to it, because English found himself the victim of what sure looks like an intimidation campaign.
The opinion article by English is titled “Antigun Activists Ambushed Me.” In it, he says, “The survey outraged gun-control advocates, who believed it could hurt them in court. They proceeded to disparage me professionally and tried to delay the progress of my research without any scientific basis.”
English says that the “attorneys general of Illinois and Washington started issuing subpoenas” for his “documents and communications” so that he “had to abandon [his] research for months at a time.”
Meanwhile, members of the media contacted him “armed with politicized talking points identical to those used by the state attorneys general in their subpoenas.”
They then tried to attack his research itself, but his questions had been reviewed and he’d done everything the way it was supposed to be done.
Yet between subpoenas and rabid reporters looking to collect his scalp, there’s nothing going on here that can’t be attributed to outright malice because English published what he found rather than just pretending it didn’t happen.
Think about this, though. Most people in this day and age know what their colleagues think about a wide variety of topics that often have nothing at all to do with work. Is it really that hard to believe that someone might not publish research that goes against what their co-workers believe?
It’s not like anti-gunners have a history of really presenting rational, reasoned debate. Some are capable of it but a whole lot more default into the “you just want kids to be murdered” antics we’ve all grown so…fond…of.
English, however, didn’t play that way. He presented the facts as he found them.
How many more studies found that guns weren’t terrible things but were never presented to the public? How many other people succumbed to the pressure, buckling to silence their own voices because they didn’t want their colleagues to hate them?
English isn’t the first. He won’t be the last.
And those who claim to value science need to sit down, shut up, and stop pretending to value anything of the sort. All they want are people with letters after their name that will just echo their preferred talking points under the trappings of “research” and nothing more.
They hate English because he wouldn’t do that when the facts didn’t support it.
