Opinion

Listen to FBI, not bogus science, on gun safety

A recent story (“Connecticut among five safest states for gun violence,” October 12) cites a sham study by the Center for American Progress, CAP, as evidence that Connecticut’s restrictive gun control laws are responsible for making Connecticut “the fifth-safest state with respect to shootings.” That bogus conclusion is based on junk science that would not pass muster in a middle school science fair. The people of Connecticut deserve better than that.

Remarkably, the “study” in its very first paragraph, describes many of the factors which influence a state’s violent crime, murder and suicide rates and then ignores all those factors in its analysis, instead focusing on only one factor: gun control laws. The nation’s top law enforcement agency, the FBI, is adamant that its crime data NOT be used to create these misleading state “rankings.”

The FBI says, “These incomplete analyses have often created misleading perceptions which adversely affect geographic entities and their residents. For this reason, the FBI has a long-standing policy against ranking participating law enforcement agencies on the basis of crime data alone. Despite repeated warnings against these practices, some data users continue to challenge and misunderstand this position.”

Here are some factors the FBI says are “known” to affect crime rates:

• Population density and degree of urbanization.

• Variations in composition of the population, particularly youth concentration.

• Stability of the population with respect to residents’ mobility, commuting patterns, and

transient factors.

• Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.

• Modes of transportation and highway systems.

• Cultural factors and educational, recreational, and religious characteristics.

• Family conditions with respect to divorce and family cohesiveness.

• Climate.

• Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.

• Administrative and investigative emphases on law enforcement.

• Citizens’ attitudes toward crime.

• Crime reporting practices of the citizenry.

The FBI has this exactly right. If you are truly interested in promoting effective laws to protect the public, you must consider all the factors that influence crime rates — not the one factor the FBI doesn’t even consider, gun control laws.

The CAP report is junk science meant to provoke a political response, not answer a legitimate research question. This approach is known in the social sciences as a “bivariate” analysis. This is where a researcher only examines the relationship between two variables, when there are in fact other factors that could influence the outcome of interest. For example, roosters crow frequently when the sun rises. There is indeed a strong correlation between these two variables. But could anyone credibly say that the sun rises because roosters crow? Of course not.

One of the gun control laws currently being pushed nationwide is legislation to criminalize virtually all private firearms transfers. Gun control advocates call these measures “universal background check” laws and claim they help make communities safer by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.

The facts don’t support that conclusion. In a recent column in the Las Vegas Review Journal, economist John Lott, Jr. notes that states with these so-called universal background checks experienced “a post-2000 increase of 15 percent in per capita rates of mass public shooting fatalities. They also saw a 38 percent increase in the rate of injury.” He goes on to note that “there is no evidence that expanded background checks reduce rates of any type of violent crime.”

Put simply, Lott’s conclusions are based on conducting research the right way — considering all the variables which contribute to violent crime and looking over an extended time frame to find answers. His findings, not CAP’s, are consistent with extensive studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by the National Academy of Sciences that found no evidence that gun control actually reduces crime, despite what gun control proponents have to say.

Our Second Amendment Rights in Connecticut are under assault. New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg is funding this well-coordinated effort. As he continues to peddle these pernicious lies about the Second Amendment, the NRA will fight back every time to debunk the junk science he is funding.

Christopher G. Kopacki is the NRA legislative liaison for the state of Connecticut. He received his doctorate in public policy and administration from Virginia Commonwealth University.