Is it simply because the conclusion is already in hand before the first piece of evidence is scrutinized? Any rookie researcher knows you cannot pursue a singular outcome and ignore everything that disputes it.
You must discard emotions and consider facts, as difficult as that apparently is for many.
Take the esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
For nearly a century and a half it has served as a cornerstone of knowledge for the medical community. Just last week, it published a study that demands a closer inspection.
The work was by Dr. Deepika Nehra, MD. She is a surgeon at Harborview Medical Center’s Trauma, Burn, and Critical Care Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. She and other researchers compiled the data, and the writing asserted that she alone had full access and took full responsibility.
The story was titled “Association of Community Vulnerability and State Gun Laws with Firearm Deaths in Children and Adolescents Aged 10 to 19 Years.” It asked if there is a correlation between community factors and state laws in the rate of firearm-related fatalities in young people.
According to the authors, the study examined 5,813 youths who died from “assault-related firearms injury.” That’s a fair starting point, until the source of the data is revealed.
The research relied on work done by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) for firearm-related deaths between Jan. 1, 2020, and June 30, 2022.
It must be noted that GVA is vehemently anti-gun rights. It is a nonprofit group that regularly inflates mass shooting numbers that are parroted by the mainstream media and anti-Second Amendment politicians for their own purposes. These statistics are hardly rooted in reality.
How so?
The group claimed in 2019 that there were 417 mass shootings in the U.S. According to the FBI’s much more credible numbers, there were 30.
The GVA uses the slippery definition of any time four or more people are even slightly wounded in a gun-related incident as a mass shooting. This creates sensational headlines, but it is far from the truth as established by more responsible sources.
GVA co-founder and Executive Director Mark Bryant wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times titled “We have all the data we need. Stronger gun laws would save lives.”
It should not be surprising that JAMA would publish an article slanted so far against gun rights. The American Medical Association is notoriously against gun rights, having stated that “gun violence is a public health issue that calls for physician leadership.”
JAMA is far from the only source that drew from dubious resources to blast the legal ownership of firearms in the U.S. CBS News, which has certainly taken some hits on its journalistic integrity over the years, recently plastered a headline on their website exposing their bias against gun rights.
The article was headed with, “Texas senator continues to call for common sense gun safety laws.” For the record, “common sense” was not presented in quotations.
If it were, it could simply mean the writer was quoting the politician and their opinion that gun control measures were needed. Perfectly newsworthy, even though the article’s contents likely would still be slanted against gun rights.
However, “common sense” is written as though it is the gospel truth and deserves no scrutiny or debate.
From the perspective of the writer and thus CBS News, there is no arguing the point that their conclusions are the correct ones, and the politician is right for pursuing whatever pet gun control initiative makes “common sense.”
Americans are not stupid, and the tens of millions who enjoy their gun rights are well aware of how biased information sources may be. Something as important as the Second Amendment deserves thoughtful and fact-based consideration, not slanted coverage with a scripted outcome.
