Science and gun violence: why is the research so weak? [Part 2] - Boing Boing - 1 views
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Scientists are missing some important bits of data that would help them better understand the effects of gun policy and the causes of gun-related violence. But that’s not the only reason why we don’t have solid answers. Once you have the data, you still have to figure out what it means. This is where the research gets complicated, because the problem isn’t simply about what we do and don’t know right now. The problem, say some scientists, is that we —from the public, to politicians, to even scientists themselves—may be trying to force research to give a type of answer that we can’t reasonably expect it to offer. To understand what science can do for the gun debates, we might have to rethink what “evidence-based policy” means to us.
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For the most part, there aren’t a lot of differences in the data that these studies are using. So how can they reach such drastically different conclusions? The issue is in the kind of data that exists, and what you have to do to understand it, says Charles Manski, professor of economics at Northwestern University. Manski studies the ways that other scientists do research and how that research translates into public policy.
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Even if we did have those gaps filled in, Manski said, what we’d have would still just be observational data, not experimental data. “We don’t have randomized, controlled experiments, here,” he said. “The only way you could do that, you’d have to assign a gun to some people randomly at birth and follow them throughout their lives. Obviously, that’s not something that’s going to work.”
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