So, here we are, two days after this asshole shot and killed 10 people in Boulder, CO and a team of cops, prosecutors and FBI agents still don’t know why the kid did what he did. But The New York Times has already figured it out.

              You can read the paper’s analysis in a piece written by Max Fisher, who says that the shooting occurred because Americans own so many guns.  That’s it. As Grandpa would say, “prust und prushit.” Which means nothing more needs to be said. Thanks Grandpa.

              This so-called research which explains the fatal and non-fatal injuries which 125,000+ Americans suffer each year from gun shots has been going on since the 1990’s and is perhaps most frequently cited in the work of public health specialists like our friend David Hemenway, who regularly publishes articles which correlate the high rate of fatal violence in the United States with all the enormous pile of guns we have lying around.

              No other advanced country has so many killings, no other country has so many guns. The United States contains 4% of the entire world’s population but owns 42% of the world’s non-military guns. That explains that.

              Our friend Max Fisher seems to think, incidentally, that words like ‘homicide’ and ‘mass shootings’ mean the same thing. He tosses the words back and forth as if one can simply be substituted for the other. If we have a much higher rate of homicide because we own so many guns, when it comes to explaining mass shootings, the same argument can be made.

              Incidentally, the word ‘research’ is also bandied about in Fisher’s commentary to describe the works which he referenced in order to end up saying what he said. I must be a really old guy because when I went to graduate school to do research on the origins of capitalism, I had to go out, find some previously undiscovered data, analyze the data, and use the results to make an argument based on what I believed was a new set of verifiable events.

              The ‘research’ that Fisher has read to come up with his explanation for mass shootings isn’t based on analyzing previously unknown or unstudied data at all. The scholars who tell us that more guns equal more violence simply take some data which is in the public domain, run it through a regression analysis model and – voila! The result shows them what they want to believe. Want to believe something different?  Change the analytical model. 

              Regression analysis is a very handy tool for comparing how two separate trends change over time. Everyone can understand a cute, little chart with two wavy lines. But if you try to use this methodology to explain how one line’s movement affects the movement of the other line, you’re skating on very thin ice.  But so what? At least The New York Times gets something into print, right?

              The issue isn’t whether or not Americans own too many guns. The issue is what types of guns are used to commit mass murders and how many of those guns are floating around. So, we have 270 million guns in the civilian arsenal. So what?  Most of those guns are the types of guns that are never used to kill anyone. Many of the people who own guns don’t even know where the gun is located in their home.

              This kid was arrested in Boulder with an assault pistol, i.e., a short-barreled gun with a collapsible stock and a hand grip for extra control. He obviously knew enough about guns to put together a custom-made model which he could take undetected into a public space and then start blasting away. This type of behavior and planning is quite unlike what happens in virtually 99% of all shootings which occur because two dopes get into an argument, neither backs down and out comes a gun.

              If we really want to do something about mass shootings, then at the very least we need to understand exactly what we’re talking about. What we learn from Max Fisher doesn’t really explain anything at all.

Please sign our petition to ban assault rifles: http://chng.it/vKPcgVB7