Harvard’s Firearms Fraud
January 14th, 2007 by Syd
The Harvard School of Public Health has recently released a “study” funded by the radically anti-civil rights Joyce Foundation which purports to show that states with higher firearms ownership have higher homicide rates. The authors of the “study,” Matthew Miller and his colleague David Hemenway, have produced similar pieces of anti-gun statistical propaganda in the past. Their work is a fraud and a lie.
Jeff Soyer does a wonderful job of debunking this fatally flawed “study” on his blog using the very same numbers used by the Harvard propagandists. I encourage you to read Jeff’s debunking because this study will no doubt come up for years to come in gun control arguments. Jeff includes a complete table of the actual numbers. (His work is so good on this that I saved the whole page to my hard drive for future reference.)
Jeff’s conclusion:
Hemenway and Miller and Lambert are full of crap because states like North Dakota and Maine and Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, et al have far higher rates (percentages) of homes with firearms and far lower rates of death by firearm homicide that many states with MUCH LOWER rates of firearm ownership and with MUCH MORE gun control.
All you need to do is compare Massachusetts and New Hampshire to see that the percentage of homes with firearms has nothing to do with the rate of homicide by firearms.
The problem isn’t guns. It might be demographics, it might be a failure to lock up criminals or keep them locked up but it isn’t households with guns. That dog don’t hunt.
End of story.
This incident can and should serve as a primary case study in how shadowy organizations like the Joyce Foundation work to undermine our civil rights and enslave the American people. Stated concisely, they hire people to lie a lot and cook the numbers until they get a result that fits their argument. Also, it illustrates the strategy of the firearms prohibitionists to frame the discussion of Second Amendment rights in the terms of a public health issue for the purposes of increased regulation, and ultimately abolition.
Our thanks to Jeff for a masterful piece of debunking. Click here for Jeff’s piece.