JAMA Throws Science Out the Window To Push Gun Control

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You may have seen the headline: "Half the World's Gun-related Deaths Occur in Just 6 Countries, Including the U.S." or something like it online or in print.  The source of these headlines is a "study" published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).  Yet this study almost completely ignores basic principles of scientific research.

When studying ANYTHING - disease, poverty, addiction, violence, crime, or anything else - about a population, raw numbers are completely irrelevant.  More than this, using raw numbers is highly deceptive,  What counts is the population adjusted RATE of what you are studying.

For instance, we could look at traffic accident deaths by nation.  In 2013, the United States had 34,064 traffic deaths, while Belize had only 81.  Applying the logic in the linked article, Belize would be the safer nation.  However, Belize is a very small nation, while the US is a fairly large one.  When we adjust for that population difference, we learn the truth: Belize is a much more dangerous place to drive with 24.4 deaths per 100,000 population, while the rate in the US is only 10.6 per 100,000 population.  In fact, Belize is nearly 2.5 times more dangerous.

Yet JAMA and the linked article make the "mistake" of using raw numbers instead of population adjusted rates.  They produced this dataset:

Wow, the US really has a problem if we are the 2nd worst nation in the world for gun deaths - we are much worse than even Afghanistan - right? WRONG!

Five paragraphs in, we find the following:

"Although more people died in the U.S. from guns in 2016 than almost any other country in the world, several other nations had far higher death rates, calculated as the number of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people. El Salvador recorded the highest gun-related death rate in the world at 39.2 deaths per 100,000, followed by Venezuela (38.7), Guatemala (32.3), and Greenland (25.9). The U.S. was not in the top 10."  (Emphasis mine.)

ANY DATA THAT IS NOT ADJUSTED FOR POPULATION IS COMPLETELY USELESS - PERIOD!

Additionally, the so-called study mixes two very different categories of deaths: Homicides and suicides.  What happens when we just look at homicides and adjust for population?

When we adjust for population, a totally different picture is brought into focus.  The United States is not only outside the top ten, it has far less deaths than the top ten - all of which have strict gun control.

If an article on any other topic was submitted to JAMA with basic research errors like this, it would have never have been published.  However, when it comes to gun control, the rules get ignored.

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