Don’t Bring Cherry-Picked Data to a Gun Fight: 2A Supporters Attack Biased Newsweek Article

By Rachel Lawrence

Don’t bring cherry-picked data to a gun fight.

If there’s one thing all who propose strong gun restriction laws should realize, it’s that 2nd Amendment supporters know their stuff, and we’re not afraid to call you out on misinformation.

In a Newsweek opinion article masquerading as a news, a Boston University professor and a BU researcher argued for stricter gun control laws by using a new public database they created regarding state firearm laws. While the database itself is quite interesting, their arguments, presented with fancy diagrams and statistics about rising gun death rates, became low-hanging fodder for 2nd Amendment supporters within hours of its publication.

Readers quickly picked up on problems with the “study”, most specifically that the authors were not taking into consideration historical trends and instead merely considering data that filled their pre-formed opinions towards guns. The ensuing comments on Newsweek alone are worth reading.

The first sentence of the article states:

“From 2014 to 2015, the United States experienced its largest annual increase in firearm deaths over the past 35 years, a 7.8 percent upturn in a single year.”

Scary, right? Only if you’re intentionally avoiding data that doesn’t fit into your worldview. This “upturn in a single …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms