Reply #25: Tough question, actually...

[benEzra]

I don't care for John Lott; not just the whole Mary Rosh thing, but his political associations. His raw data has for the most part held up to critique, but he has been careless at times (the lost hard drive story reminded me of Micheal Bellesiles) and I personally wouldn't rely on him.

Gary Kleck seems more solid to me, and in fact he started his research as a convinced gun-ban advocate and says he came to his conclusions only reluctantly. I think he is a lot more respected by his anti-gun peers than Lott is. Of course, if Kleck's research didn't support my own views, I wonder if I'd feel as positively about him; it's human nature to view researchers who tell us what we want to hear as "good researchers," and that's true whether the researcher in question is Gary Kleck or Arthur "43 times" Kellerman. FWIW, Kleck is still what I would consider moderately anti-gun in his personal views, but I don't know that that lends him any additional credibility when he comes to pro-gun conclusions.

I honestly don't know of too many well-known researchers in the field, pro or con, whose work would be considered objective. I will say that I personally think peer review on gun issues is MUCH more rigorous in the criminological journals than in most medical journals (that boneheaded J. Trauma blunder on rifle wounds comes to mind, how that slipped past peer review we'll never know), but when's the last time you heard a press release about a study in a criminological journal? They are just not high profile.

Sadly, the way research is structured today, if you want grant money--not just on the gun issue, but on most anything outside the hard sciences--the way to get it seems to be to push an agenda and try to get your idealogy funded by some interest group, corporation, NGO, or government agency who agrees with your preconceptions. On the gun issue, NSSA/SAAMI/NRA/whatever is certainly going to only fund pro-gun researchers (if they fund research at all, probably not), and the medical establishment funds almost exclusively anti-gun researchers, as far as I can determine. So the disinterested observer, if any even exist, is probably someone you've never heard of, who is a criminologist rather than an epidemiologist by training.