Alphecca

Brady Bunch & Hemenway & Gun Control

Interesting to note that not only does Yahoo News consider the Huffington Rag to be a "news source" but that the Huffington Rag itself now has two columnists writing anti-rights screeds about firearms on a weekly basis, Josh Sugarman and the Brady Bunch's Paul Helmke, with no one from the other side of the issue allowed as a counter-balance.

In his latest press release "post" Helmke gushes orgasmic over David Hemenway's book, Private Guns, Public Health. Helmke drools:

Hemenway calls for action at the federal level: licensing of gun owners and registration of hand guns; one-gun-per-month laws to reduce gunrunning; all gun transfers to go through licensed dealers with background checks; greater scrutiny of licensed dealers; and a federal agency (similar to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) with the power to regulate firearms as a consumer product.

Helmke conveniently leaves out the fact that Hemenway's "research" and book was funded by George Soros, the billionaire who has financed anti-gun initiatives and causes for years. No conflict of interest there, huh?

Hemenway's previous "research" has already been called into question as nothing more than "data dredging" by scholars such as Dr. Joanne Eisen and Dr. Paul Gallant:

Hemenway did not tell a single lie in order to obfuscate the truth. By creative use of the English language, he deliberately blurred the distinction between fully-automatic and semi-automatic firearms, and then set out to paint the picture of potentially murderous, machine-gun-owning problem-drinkers, living right down the block from - or right next door to - Mr. and Mrs. Joe Citizen, and family. That mental picture is enough to scare the pants off just about ANY peaceable American, including gun-owners like us!

[...]

While Hemenway hasn't deviated from the truth, he has nevertheless managed to end up with a lie, because his "truths" are irrelevant, and out of context. What Hemenway hasn't told us is that law-abiding gun-owners just don't go off half-cocked, shooting up their neighbors, and everyone else in sight!

It's simply not the gun-owners in Hemenway's survey who are the ones wreaking havoc on America. It's the unprincipled, fear-mongering medical-politicians like David Hemenway who are guilty - by taking potshots at science, truth, and the Second Amendment!

It is obvious to us that David Hemenway (H) had no intention of producing a balanced, intellectually serious assessment of our estimates of defensive gun use (DGU). Instead, his critique serves the narrow political purpose of "getting the estimate down," for the sake of advancing the gun control cause. An honest, scientifically based critique would have given balanced consideration to flaws that tend to make the estimate too low (e.g., people concealing DGUs because they involved unlawful behavior, and our failure to count any DGUs by adolescents), as well as those that contribute to making them too high. Equally important, it would have given greatest weight to relevant empirical evidence, and little or no weight to idle speculation about possible flaws. H's approach is precisely the opposite--one-sided and almost entirely speculative. Readers who have any doubts about the degree to which H's paper is imbalanced might carry out a simple exercise to assess our claim¾ count the number of lines H devotes to flaws tending to make the estimate too high and the number devoted to flaws making the estimate too low. We submit that the ratio is over 100-to-1, i.e., almost entirely devoted to speculations about why the estimate is too high.

The political function of this advocacy scholarship is clear. While high estimates of DGU frequency do not constitute an obstacle to moderate controls over guns, they constitute the most serious obstacle to advocacy of gun prohibition. Disarming the mass of noncriminal prospective crime victims would, if high DGU estimates are even approximately [Page 1447] correct, result in large numbers of foregone opportunities for uses of guns that could prevent deaths, injuries, and property loss. To acknowledge high DGU frequency would be to concede the most significant cost of gun prohibition. H's paper is an attempt to neutralize concerns about such costs and to provide intellectual respectability for positions identified with Handgun Control Incorporated (HCI), the nation's leading gun control advocacy group.

Or hiding from? The truth?