Dude, My Gun Control Research is Totally Legit! No, You Can’t See It…

By Bob Owens

Gun control researcher Adam Lankford at the University of Alabama has a budding credibility problem.

Last month I advised supporters of federal gun research to give the public concrete reasons to believe the work would be unaffected by politics. Here’s an example of how not to do that. Fox News reported a few weeks ago that University of Alabama researcher Adam Lankford, author of a media-sensation study on the connection between mass shootings and gun ownership across countries, refuses to share his data and the details of his methodology with skeptics.

I’d be the last person to assume that a news story has all its facts straight, but the details in this Fox News article, if accurate, are disturbing. Academics are expected to be as transparent as possible with their data and methods, but when skeptics wondered how Lankford was able to tally the number of mass shootings in countries where the records are sparse and are not kept in a language that he understands, Lankford offered only the vaguest responses.

Award-winning Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck is among critics that suspect that Lankford’s methodology is of dubious validity and amounts to junk science featuring made-up statistics.

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Source:: Bearing Arms