Op-Ed: Medical Journal Bias on Guns

by John Lott, Jr.

Medical journals are not always the objective, purely scientific publications we might think that they are. Their editors have increasingly strayed into politics at the expense of scientific accuracy. For example, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has over the last few months published a number of extremely biased and poorly done studies on gun control.

One of the articles, written by Garen Wintemute, Anthony Braga, and David Kennedy, makes the case for extending background checks to the private transfers of guns, arguing that “perhaps the principal reason for the well-documented failure of the Brady Act to lower rates of firearm-related homicide is that its requirements do not apply to private-party gun sales.” But they do so without providing any evidence that these or any other background checks reduce crime. Further, they conveniently overlook the only research that has been done on what they are proposing. For instance, the updated "More Guns, Less Crime" specifically studied this very issue and found no evidence that either type of law helped reduced crime.

Click here to read the entire op-ed from The National Review.