When so-called “researchers” set out to prove something concerning guns and what the mainstream media refer to as “gun violence,” they typically can use inaccurate data or manipulate the data in some manner to at least prove that what they thought was true and publish it to show what a bad problem guns really are.
So, imagine our surprise when researchers at New York University couldn’t prove what they thought was true and had to settle for a secondary, less sensational headline.
According to a December 8 report at nyunews.com, in November, researchers set out to prove that people in communities that experience “mass shootings” are more likely to vote for gun-control candidates. In doing so, they used information from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) and nearly half a billion voter records from the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
Of course, that’s all the information you need to know that this study is typical garbage-in, garbage-out. The GVA has been discredited so many times that most anti-gun researchers won’t even use the data anymore. In fact, the Bloomberg-funded anti-gun website The Trace won’t use GVA numbers, which report about 19 times more “mass shootings” than the FBI does.
Even using GVA data, NYU researchers still weren’t able to prove what they thought would be true: Surely people living where mass shootings have taken place will change and vote Democrat, not Republican. However, researchers analyzed areas within 10 miles of a recent mass shooting and found that these incidents boosted voter turnout, especially in Democratic neighborhoods, but did not skew voters’ position on candidates nor their party affiliations.
So instead of “Mass Shootings Cause Local Voters to Turn Democrat,” NYU had to settle for the headline, “NYU Law links mass shootings and voter turnout.”
“They’re probably not going to shift anything like, you know, congressional race or even a mayoral race,” NYU Law researcher Kevin Morris and University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Kelsey Shoub said. “But they might shift how city council races go—it could, it could have an impact on who is elected at the really local level.”
Note how that quotation begins a shift from what they actually proved. Their study proved living in proximity of shootings didn’t change the vote, but here they are already saying it “could” have an impact on local elections. But they list no proof of that.
Since Morris couldn’t prove what he aimed to, he even offered some suggestions on how citizens might be able to change the trend more to his liking.
“The importance of talking to friends and developing a political stance around so many of these issues is really important, and that’s how we build change,” Morris said. “That’s how we build power—is by translating these things that happen in our lives and our communities into pressure on candidates and politicians.”
In the end, Morris speculated that even though what he set out to prove wasn’t true, there is still some validity to the idea.
“Mass shootings can shift how people vote on a ballot initiative,” he said. “It’s easier to shift how people vote on a specific policy—a particular proposal to make gun ownership safer, restrict access to guns—than to change the party of the candidate for whom they’re voting.”
For anti-gun advocates, hope always springs eternal. Even when they’re proven wrong.