Biased “Researchers” Playing Games with Numbers

By NRAHQ

Opinion

Fairfax, VA – -(Ammoland.com)- Stanford Law Professor John Donohue and Theodora Boulouta, a Stanford undergrad, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that claims their new research shows the 1994 “assault weapons” ban really did work.

Their finding is that, “Compared with the decade before its adoption, the federal assault weapon ban in effect from September 1994 through 2004 was associated with a 25 percent drop in gun massacres (from eight to six) and a 40 percent drop in fatalities (from 81 to 49).”

For some reason, Donohue and Boulouta chose to use six fatalities as the minimum, instead of the common definition of four or even the Obama-era attempt to reduce the threshold to three. Jacob Sullum at Reason has a pretty good guess as to why Donohue and Boulouta chose six: “Yet they chose to focus on cases with six or more fatalities, for no obvious reason except that it exaggerates the changes they attribute to the “assault weapon” ban that expired in 2004.” Sullum’s article is titled, “A Suspiciously Selective, Logically Shaky Analysis of Mass Shooting Data …Read the Rest

Source:: AmmoLand