Police lives are put at risk by a country awash in guns

[Always Right]

61. Citation appreciated

I appreciate you showing where you got your "evidence from.

However it doesn't actually show what you seem to think it shows.

The RAND CORPORATION didn't do a study or collect any facts of their own, instead it reviewed studies done by other groups.

From the link you sent...

"The studies that have been done often reach opposite conclusions to each other"

"RAND concluded that, first and foremost, far more research is necessary."

"its review does seem to point in a direction" ... "supports the idea that more guns lead to more gun deaths."

So basically a non-partisan group look at studies by other groups and came to the conclusion that the research is inconclusive and that more research is needed but the results point in a direction. Hardly conclusive proof of anything.

For all we know, 95 gun control groups did studies that showed gun control works and 5 gun rights groups did studies and showed that it doesn't work. Would it be proper to conclude that gun control is 95% effective? I don't think so.

What your link showed is that you can do a study to prove what ever you want to prove.

That is why the NRA has opposed using taxpayer money to fund the CDC because they want to call gun violence a disease and government groups only really want to prove is that that group needs more money to research the problem.

I would support any neutral outcome independent research, but the CDC certainly is not neutral or outcome independent and should not be funded with taxpayer money.

When a side with an agenda does research, you wind up with bogus "facts" like the number of school shootings because they include things which are not school shootings but count them as such.

The number of school shootings most often cited comes from Every Town for Gun Safety. The problem with their numbers is that when I think of a school shooting, I think that a crazy person goes on a shooting spree randomly killing people but their numbers include anytime a gun goes off on or near a school regardless of the circumstances. Recently it was pointed out that the list of school shootings included school shooting on January 3, 2018 at East Olive Elementary in St. Johns, Michigan where a man committed suicide in parking lot with nobody else injured. However it turns out that the school had shut down shut down more than six months earlier and was no longer a school but a vacant building. They have since deleted that one but there are plenty more examples of bogus school shootings.

For example, their list of school shootings includes an event on January 10, 2018 at Grayson College in Denison, Texas where the instructor at the at Criminal Justice Center was demonstrating a firearm simulator and when the instructor was removing their live weapon to be substituted with the training weapon, accidentally fired a shot. Nobody was injured. So what it was a school, albeit one that specifically required firearms, and an accident with no injuries, it remains on the list of "school shootings" just to puff up the statistics.

There are plenty of more examples of the group doing that so you can see why I don't put any faith in what amounts to a study done of other studies.