You're welcome.
First, your source, "thetrace.org" is quite corrupt, a known anti-2A website: "The Trace is an American non-profit journalism outlet devoted to gun-related news in the United States. It was established in 2015 with seed money from the gun control advocacy group
Everytown for Gun Safety, which was founded by former New York City mayor
Michael Bloomberg,[2] and went live on June 19 of that year.[3] The site's editorial director is James Burnett.
Second, they even admit to their own bias on their
About page: "We bring an admitted bias to our beat: We believe that this country’s rates of firearm-related deaths and injuries — an average of 91 lives lost per day, and more than 200 people suffering nonfatal bullet wounds — are far too high," an emotional appeal preface to their subsequent call for further gun controls from all sides.
This, their article trashing the Harvard study isn't journalism at all. Claims like it "was not written by researchers" are patently false. Anyone with an advanced degree is a "researcher," and one of the authors has his PhD. Of course he's a researcher. You do not obtain a PhD without having learning long before to conduct proper research. In fact, the process of obtaining a PhD requires PhD-level research, and neither one's PhD advisers nor the review board will recommend or confer a PhD until the research is rock-solid. With two post-graduate degrees under my belt, I amassed some 1,822 papers involved in my own research, including 18 full-fledged research papers for my Master of Science and another 48 full-fledged research papers for my earlier Masters in Business Administration. These include the additional classes I took for concentrations in each program. I graduated at the top of my class in both programs, with all 66 papers having been graded by instructors possessing PhD's. On top of that, I was the Assistant Chief of Academics for a leading U.S. Air Force school at Nellis AFB, where I developed courseware and helped the school obtain full academic accreditation.
So, whether you believe it or not, I've had a *little* bit of experience in determining the difference between excellent and shoddy research, and the Harvard paper is indeed very good research, whereas thetrace.org's article is a pathetic, libtard attempt to discredit it.
Third, thetrace.org just flat-out LIED when it claimed, "the
Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, a journal that, unlike most academic publications, does not have peer review."
Horse hockey: "Students at Harvard Law School produce scholarly journals devoted to specific substantive areas of the law and to various approaches to examining legal developments.
These peer reviewed publications offer invaluable practical experience in legal writing, editing, and scholarship."
If you knew anything at all about research, solus, you would have been able to find this reference in about the same ten seconds or so it took myself, and if you had any integrity, you not be endorsing thetrace.org's false claims.
Fourth, thetrace.org article claims, the Harvard study "does not meet even the loosest criteria of an academic study." Ok, by now, thetrace.org no longer has any academic credibility whatsoever. Reading through their pathetic attempt to discredit the Harvard study shows thetrace.org's "reporters" would have failed Base News Reporting 101, much less be qualified to comment on scholarly research. They make yet another (of many more) false claims by saying, it' does not possess "either new analysis of an old dataset," when at the bottom of EVERY PAGE of the Harvard study you wind a total of 150 references to
Studies of prior studies more certainly IS "new analysis" and fully comprises "scholarly research" which, in the context of this particular study, most certainly has been peer-reviewed.
Yes, the piece (of crap) on thetrace.org is THAT bad.
With respect to your dailykos citation, I believe Shamash's opinion, offered on Sep 05 at 06:47:05 PM, is spot on:
Out of curiousity
a) Will you be turning your attention to shoddy gun papers that excite the left wing? Or are gun papers that excite the left wing automatically non-shoddy and thus need no scrutiny?
b) Do you have any opinion on the recent CDC firearm paper? Since it is making the right wing excited, can we assume it is shoddy by default, or will we have to wait for a badly written casual dismissal of it by someone completely unacquainted with statistics?
Now that I have finished with the biting sarcasm, I could write an entire diary about the flaws of your analysis. But let's just hit a few high points:
1) Number of firearms per capita is unrelated to firearm availability. If there are 100 people and one of them has $100 and the rest have none, that is $1 per person on average, but says nothing about the likelihood that any one of those 100 people has one or more dollars. Using firearms per 100 people to "debunk" one of the opening statements of the paper is flawed. You might still be right, but you aren't showing it with the argument you presented.
2) The paper makes a statement about murder rates, at which point you a) blithely discount one of the world's largest economies as a nation worth measuring, and then b) use the fact that you discounted it to call the statement false.
It's okay to have a strong opinion on gun control, one way or the other. But torturing numbers in an obviously partisan fashion is probably not the most convincing way to "debunk" a paper you think is torturing the numbers in an obviously partisan fashion. Doing the same thing would be, as a2nite noted, selling odious BS to the stupid.
solus, I tired of your pedantic nonsense and grow increasingly suspicious as to your true affiliations. The "attack the edge" pattern I've observed her suggests you're not a 2A supporter at all, except in a limited fashion, but certainly contrary to the principles abundantly espoused by our Founding Fathers.
Bottom Line: When you hold up two flagrant
LIARS as sources protecting your point of view, you're either ignorant or you're knowingly complicit in the
LYING.
Which is it, solus?