Wintemute

1 post

Argumentum ad Metum

Garen Wintemute is at it again. For those of you just joining us, he’s a doctor at the University of California Davis Center who made his mark turning the gun-control debate from a political issue into one of perceived public health back in the early 1990’s.

This week, he published a study entitled Inside Gun Shows: What goes on When Everybody Thinks Nobody’s Watching. He was assisted by the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, which received $175,000 from the Joyce Foundation (pdf) this year for “Gun Violence” research.

As is to be expected, the “research” here consists almost entirely of take-my-word-for-it anecdotes.  The recovering academic in me took immediate notice of the fact that there are very few citations or statistics presented, and that many of those are self-referential (1).