A New Low for Gun Control Advocacy

The gun control battle was put to bed some time ago. Time and again the end of the world scenarios gun control advocates predicated failed to come to fruition. In fact violent crime rates have continued to decline even as gun restrictions have been loosened. Even though one could argue that the declining violent crime rate is unrelated to the loosening of gun restrictions the claim that gun restrictions reduce violent crime has been proven false.

Maybe it’s because they never learned critical thinking in school or it may be related to the fact that there’s a lot of money in shilling for gun control thanks to big money tyrants like Michael Bloomberg but gun control advocates can’t admit that their claims are wrong. So what’s a gun control advocate to do? Make shit up, obviously! And not just a handful of minor fabrications. The time has come for some new level bullshit. Now to prove gun control works real states must be compared to entirely fictitious states:

The state in question is Connecticut. In 1995, Connecticut tightened its laws for handgun purchases. It raised the age requirement from 18 to 21, thus cutting off part of an age group that’s statistically prone to violence. It also required purchasers to apply for a permit at their local police station, which would perform a more extensive background check. Finally, the permits would not be approved without proof of attendance of an eight-hour safety course.

So, there was a clear before-and-after the implementation of these laws to track gun-related homicides. The question is how to find an appropriate population to serve as a control for Connecticut.

Quite cleverly, the authors created one. Rather than looking for a single state that matches Connecticut’s demographics, they performed a statistical analysis that created a synthetic state that tracked Connecticut’s pattern of firearm homicides before the law’s passage. This state was composed of a weighted rate from a number of different states. So, for example, neighboring Rhode Island accounts for about 70 percent of the synthetic state’s composition, Maryland another 15 percent. Then the authors created a similar synthetic state that tracked Connecticut’s non-firearm homicides.

(Because the study period overlapped the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, where a number of Connecticut residents worked, that year was dropped from the non-firearm analysis.)

The synthetic state analysis also took into account a large number of factors that tend to influence rates of homicide, such as the percentage of the population at or below the poverty line, the percent between 15 and 24 years of age, and the number of police per unit of population.

For homicides from all causes other than guns, the synthetic state tracked Connecticut both before and after the passage of the 1995 gun control law. A few years after the implementation of implementation of the law in late 1995, however, firearm homicide rates diverged, with Connecticut’s continuing to drop along a previous trend, while the synthetic states (like the national average) saw this rate stabilize.

This is a level of fail that’s almost impressive. Gun control shills are so desperate that they’re now claiming gun control works because statistical studies of make-believe states say so. I could also prove whatever point I wanted if I based my claims on the results of a statistical study of a state I made up.

Go home gun control shills, you’re drunk.