This sounds impressive, doesn’t it?
Locking Up Guns Could Reduce Teen And Childhood Firearm Deaths By A Third
Most US households with children do not safely store firearms in the way the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends: locked up and unloaded. If parents simply locked up all their guns, then up to a third of gun suicides and accidental deaths among children and teens could be avoided, researchers estimate in a new study.
Cut by a third. I think we need to take a look at the study, Association of Increased Safe Household Firearm Storage With Firearm Suicide and Unintentional Death Among US Youths, itself instead of taking channel 13’s word for it.
This modeling study using Monte Carlo simulation estimated that 6% to 32% of youth firearm deaths (by suicide and unintentional firearm injury) could be prevented, depending on the probability that an intervention motivates adults who currently do not lock all household firearms to instead lock all guns in their home.
So the researchers actually came up with an oddly wide range of 6% to 32% (which is less than a third). So far, so good. That would be nice to know. How did they do that?
DESIGN, SETTING, and PARTICIPANTS: A modeling study using Monte Carlo simulation of youth firearm suicide and unintentional firearm mortality in 2015. A simulated US national sample of firearm-owning households where youth reside was derived using nationally representative rates of firearm ownership and storage and population data from the US Census to test a hypothetical intervention, safe storage of firearms in the home, on youth accidental death and suicide.
This wasn’t even a dubious “synthetic control” (make up imaginary states by selectively combining real states) study. Simulation. They didn’t use real data. They made it up. Then they applied “hypothetical intervention” to their imaginary data.
For the record, you can stop right there. The “study” is meaningless. But the fact that their “youth” includes 18 and 19 year old adults would have told you that anyway.
I also found it amusing that they created their imaginary country using firearms numbers and storage methods gathered in the National Firearms survey, in which 45% of selectees declined to participate, leaving only those stupid enough to tell strangers how many guns they have and how they’re stored, if even if they are locked up.
Then there is this:
we assumed that all deaths resulted from firearms kept in homes where youth resided.
Invalid assumption, which even the most cursory web search could have told them. Even The Trace admits that 1 in 5 youth suicides are committed with guns not kept in the person’s home.
I could go about things like them doing a study about 0-19 year olds but using data from studies on 0-17, or that gun-owning adults (18, 19) need only unlock their safely stored gun and do the deed. Instead, let me explain how they could have come to meaningful conclusions.
At least a dozen states have so-called “safe storage” laws. For each state, graph the unintentional firearms death rate per 100,000 for people 0-17, for the period of 1999 to 2017 (years chosen because their readily available in WISQARS).
Then graph the firearms suicide rates for the same group and period.
Now identify the point in time when the safe storage law went into effect in each state.
Note the trend. Did the rate increase or decrease abruptly? Did the pre-law trend simply continue? Are there other discontinuities in the trend at other points in time which you can correlate to some known event (such as a sudden increase during a period of high unemployment)?
Compare the trends of the states. Did each state experience the same trend (more likely to be a correlation with the storage law), or do the differ significantly?
We have 30-something states without “safe storage” laws. Pick a dozen of those, preferably states with otherwise similar demographics as one of the “safe” states; the idea being to minimize the effect of non-safe storage factors.
Graph the same data for the same period, and analyze for the same trends.
How do the “unsafe” trends compare to the “safe” trends?
Now you have data to support a real conclusion.
But wait! There’s more.
Run another set of state by state graphs; this time for number and rate of firearms-related murders. We want to see if locking up one’s security had any negative effects. Saving one kid at the expense of 2-3 murder victims is expensive.
If you really want to be comprehensive, graph home burglaries and violent crime rates for the same period. Did locking up security embolden burglars and rapists?
But real data might not give you the results you want.
[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]
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“If you really want to be comprehensive, graph home burglaries and violent crime rates for the same period.”
You would have to, since looking only at *firearm* *murders* for the period is unreasonable. Look at the example of England, where keeping the people disarmed resulted in an increase in serious violence with knives and blunt instruments, because the thugs no longer needed guns (as well as with guns, because thugs can still get them and don’t care about storage laws anyway).
It’s instructive to note that the state in which the AAP demands you keep your guns is precisely the same state the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in Heller when the DC government demanded it, as a “prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”
Of course, that’s precisely what the left want.