Science Ain't So Bad

GUNS DAMN IT

Writing about guns is scarier than writing about religion. You never know when you’ll hit a nerve.  But what’s a science writer to do? This study (American Journal of Public Health) is the first to show a strong relationship between the number of guns in a state and the number of homicides. The more guns, the more homicides.

Make of it what you will.

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Drawings are mine.

TOUGH AUDIENCE

 LOOKING AT GUNS SCIENTIFICALLY

Two (married to each other) mathematicians are taking a shot (get it?) at settling the wide disagreement we have about guns.  They tried to get some science into this putting aside their own biases and looking at the best evidence  going back through almost a century  of data.   Dominik Wodarz (University of California, Irvine) and Natalia Komarova (Rutgers)  found mixed results. Under some circumstances, packing a weapon might prevent a mass killing whereas, where domestic violence is concerned,  less guns equals less deaths. Their goal was to get more science into the discussion and lower the temperature. They think a calm deliberative look at things might save lives.

They may be right and I hope you will give the smith’s a break here. They’re trying to get us to take a fresh look. That’s  a bad thing?

The work is published in Plos One. Plos One is a little different as journals go. It is an open access peer reviewed journal.  Its  goal is to make sure that the stuff that comes to it is professionally done but it doesn’t make an a priori judgement about the importance of the article. It trusts that the truth of the article’s claims will be thrashed out in public so it does accept a wider range of articles. Does this mean it is less reliable? MISTER ScienceAintSoBad isn’t sure.  But if you’re kinda a zealot on this issue and you don’t see anything wrong with the research but hate its conclusions, you can always go after the damn journal.

Good luck on that one.