A gun in the home......

[Pete Cortez]

16. If the NRA was suppressing government research...

...how is it that the President was able to do away with said suppression by mere executive order? Also, the sources you provide clearly indicate research was conducted in the period NRA was supposedly "suppressing" it.

In any case, I'd still like sources for the claims in the cartoons, but I'll dispose of the claims made by Hemenway and friends here:

1. "Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high income countries." Authors use a questionable proxy for gun availability (firearm suicide rates). Use of this proxy in a simple regression with no control variables is a blatant example of begging the question.

2. "Household firearm ownership levels and homicide rates across U.S. regions and states." I unfortunately can't find a free source for the full text on this. I note Hemenway's synopsis indicates the study used yet another proxy for firearms ownership. I'll withhold judgement for now and focus on his follow up piece.

3. "State-level homicide victimization rates in the U.S. in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001-2003." Here we actually have an abstract. Hemenway maps 2001-2003 homicide victimization data to 2001 survey data on firearms ownership (VPC made the same mistake, only more egregiously by using 2007 homicide data). Moreover, the use of homicide rates rather than, say, the lifetime risk of homicide victimization is confounding. If a gang were to cross the border from California to Arizona and proceed to act as violently as they had before, the impact on Arizona's homicide rate would be considerably greater than it was in California. Moreover, the authors--to their credit--warn against drawing a causal inference between prevalence of firearms ownership and homicide rate.