A Conspiracy of Deceit
by Ted Drane
Australian Shooters Journal
February 1997
Is it ignorance? Is it stupidity? Is it deceit? Those about whom I ask these questions are the politicians and news media that promote restrictive and draconian firearms controls. The answer is that mostly it is deceit, and it comes from two or three sources. The main one in Australia is the health-advocacy employees who derive information straight from the United States.
We in Australia do not have the same problems as the Americans, although John Howard is working on ensuring that we soon will have, by putting in place further gun law as a substitute for crime control.
Faced with facts and demonstrable statistical evidence one cannot reasonably conclude that gun prohibitions have a positive effect in reduction of crime, preventing suicide, averting accidents or promoting public safety. Actually, it has been well enough demonstrated that quite the opposite is true, as we will soon see.
While our society has been conditioned to accept the wisdom of teachers, physicians and, to a lesser extent, news pundits and politicians, after looking at the facts the reasonable person will conclude that in this matter they simply lie to us, to each other and to themselves. They believe their own propaganda.
In recent years and from well before the Port Arthur murders the medical community in particular has begun to enter the battle for the hearts and minds of the public regarding firearms issues. Much of what it asserts has been based on published studies in American medical journals, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in Atlanta, Georgia.
The key to the validity of any sort of statistical research is the process known as peer review, whereby other equally qualified professionals examine the methodology of a given study and the conclusions drawn upon it. On the subject of firearms the CDC has failed to perform and richly deserves the contempt it has at last been accorded. Its employees have lied by commission and omission. This is not opinion, but fact, and it bears heavily on what has happened in this country, because our gun prohibitionists are bereft of any evidence of their own, so they use American dogma.
So overwhelming have been the CDC's transgressions of scientific method on this subject that a body no less than the United States Congress has ordered them out of the business of gun control advocacy and reduced their budget by $2.6 million in order to ensure that they comply.
Let it be absolutely clear that this is the group upon whose information the gun-control advocates of Australia have relied for their information - a failed, rejected group that has shown demonstrable bias and broken research rules too numerous to list.
A recent visitor to Australia, US President Clinton has a lot in common with Prime Minister John Howard when it comes to squashing the rights of lawful and duly accredited firearms owners. But unlike Mr. Howard, he is limited by a Constitution that specifically addresses firearms rights and both a Congress and an electorate that understand and defend its provisions.
Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, whose department oversees the activities of the CDC, was ordered to appear before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee to address questions regarding the CDC's advocacy of firearms restrictions. It had come to the attention of several members of the subcommittee that research sponsored by CDC had been challenged and the conclusions it had drawn were considered so flawed that they should be disregarded as erroneous at best and fraudulent at worst.
For a governmentally sponsored organization dealing with matters as weighty as public safety, this may appear hard to believe. However, it is the case, and subsequent events have brought a scandal in those circles which ought to be repeated here in Australia, because such flawed work as that in question is all that the gun prohibitionists here have to support their stance.
Representatives of a group called Doctors for Integrity in Research and Public Policy appeared before the Congressional Hearing, and as a result, the following are among the many questions asked of Secretary Shalala, which she could not answer:
Is it not true that the only people to ever receive a CDC grant for study of any firearms issue are people with a record of committed advocacy of banning or severely restricting guns? Can you name any exceptions?
CDC Director David Satcher asserts that CDC evaluators have found the firearms studies of Dr Arthur Kellermann outstanding and among the best work the CDC has funded. Are you aware that other scholars question Kellermann's results, saying they do not appear to square with those portions of his data published as supporting them? Are you aware that when other scholars ask Kellermann for the full data supporting his results, he refuses to reveal the data? Are you aware that the CDC refuses to require him to reveal this data, which was collected with public funds? Can you think of a justification for a doctor to refuse to provide data supposedly supporting his results so that those results can be evaluated? Can you think of any justification for the CDC thus rendering publicly funded data collection into private data?
Secretary Shalala was unable to respond to any of those questions with a definitive answer. But the interrogation was just beginning. She was then asked about criticisms brought forth in an article in the Tennessee Law Review of September, 1995.
Are you aware (that) a criminologist, a biostatistician and three professors from Harvard and Columbia Medical Schools published an exhaustive scholarly evaluation of public health literature on gun issues, including CDC and CDC-funded publications? Their evaluation was that these publications were rife with extreme bias, including gross methodological error, suppression of inconvenient facts and even falsification of statistics and references?
The article cited falsehoods in CDC-funded or published materials, including incidents in which Dr Kellermann cited prior studies as saying one thing when what was actually said was the diametrical opposite. Are you aware that all of those whom the article evaluated so negatively were offered a chance to reply, but have failed to do so? If these accusations are false, why haven't Drs Kellermann, Rosenberg and other CDC people involved replied, exposing the falsity?
Shalala found herself in a very embarrassing position and was unable to answer any of the subcommittee's questions on the matter, so CDC officials were ordered to appear before them. Among other questions, they were asked the following:
The CDC's critics charge that in order to promote the claim that widespread gun ownership causes death, the CDC fails to disclose the trend data and comparisons. They say no CDC study or publication mentions that murder actually fell as handgun ownership doubled over the last twenty years. They say that no CDC study or publication mentions that when handgun ownership increased so dramatically the rate of fatal gun accidents decreased by two-thirds. Without ever mentioning these trends, CDC sponsored publications constantly harp on murders and fatal gun accidents as reasons for reducing or eliminating gun ownership. Can you suggest some reason for not discussing such vital trend data, other than that they reflect adversely on the argument for banning handguns?
This will no doubt be familiar to Australians - neglect of publication of the facts, showing, for instance, gun use in crime has long been in decline despite increasing legal gun ownership, a murder rate the same today as it was in 1915 when there were no restrictions at all on guns, even before restrictions on pistols - and so on.
While these hearings were going on, fanatical American firearms control advocates had their agenda dealt another blow, this one so severe that any existing credibility was completely destroyed, except in the minds of the openly biased. A study conducted by Professor John R Lott, Jr, of the University of Chicago Law School, clearly illustrated that the recent trend in America toward permitting law abiding persons to carry concealed firearms for personal protection and the defence of others has resulted in significant reduction of crimes of violence against the person.
Furthermore, failure to enact such legislation in those states that continue to be restrictive (now under half the total American states) has actually resulted in some 1,570 additional murders, 4,177 more rapes, 60,000 aggravated assaults and 12,000 more robberies each year than would have occurred had such laws been modified, and a net resultant economic loss to the community of over six billion dollars annually. In terms of percentages, the crime reductions observed where gun ownership has been made less restrictive were: murder, down 8.5%; rape, down 5%; aggravated assault, down 7% and robbery, down 3%.
Professor Lott's study covers the period from 1977 to 1992, and is based upon FBI reports from each one of the 3,054 individual counties in the United States. No work of this nature has ever before evaluated such a vast amount of crime data in such minute detail.
After careful evaluation of the Lott study, anti-firearm critics were able to come up with only one factor upon which to base their rejection of the study as flawed. It was alleged that its results could not be valid, because the funding for it derived from a grant by the Olin Corporation, which among other enterprises is the manufacturer of Winchester ammunition. That proved to be wishful thinking, because Olin had nothing to do with the selection of the subject and was, in fact, unaware of the study until after it was published.
Advocates of restrictive gun controls have demonstrated a lack of morality in putting their case and manipulating the media. Is there any reason to listen to such people or to adopt their recommendations - or those of their Australian counterparts?
Why do Labor and Liberal parties in Australia continue to fail to be able to defend their sources of "research" into the supposed correlation between lawful gun ownership and crime? The reason is that they are high on polemics and low on morality; they lack a genuine concern to reduce crime rates, and they do want a quick solution so they can appear in a good light politically.
If this article is incorrect, then let Associate Professor Simon Chapman of the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine and Attorney-General Daryl Williams, and Prime Minister John Howard and all the state police ministers try to refute its facts. We wish to hear from them. When will they take up our offer?
Note: in June, 1996, the American House of Representatives passed the 1997 Appropriations Act, including a provision forbidding the CDC to lobby for gun control, and a further provision stripping it of the $2.6 million intended to fund anti-gun "studies", no doubt from the same anti-gun "researchers" who have long been recipients of significant public funds.
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