A New Anti-Gun Junk Science Study, For The Children Of Course

Interesting how this Free Press article featuring a study from Pediatrics, a journal with a rather time-worn anti-gun bias just comes along now.

It's a prime example of how to craft a misleading study and article. Expect the antis to start quoting from it root and branch and ignore the obvious faults with the study.

Let's go to the headline -

The Detroit Free Press: Twenty young people a day hospitalized for gun injuries

Oh, that sounds bad, doesn't it? The two leading paragraph makes it sound even worse:

Almost one child or teen an hour is injured by a firearm seriously enough to require hospitalization, a new analysis finds. Six percent of the 7,391 hospitalizations analyzed resulted in a death, says the study in February's Pediatrics, released today.

The damage caused by gun-related injuries rarely gets the same attention as fatalities, "but that every day, 20 of our children are hospitalized for firearms injury, often suffering severe and costly injuries, clearly shows that this is a national public health problem," says Robert Sege, director of the Division of Family and Child Advocacy at Boston Medical Center and a co-author of the study.

Must be an unbiased source, that. With a study like that, whose heart-strings could not be pulled by the thought of 20 children a day being hospitalized for being shot?

It takes reading down to the sixth paragraph to find out the definition of children apparently has a much wider range than in common use:

Researchers analyzed a nationally representative sample of discharge data collected on children and adolescents (up to age 20) in 2009. The data, released in 2011, are the most recent available, Sege says.

Now that's defining childhood upward. Not only can you stay on your parent's Obamacare policy until age 26, but to this study you're still just a wee child at age 20.

Now while any child being unintentionally shot is a tragedy, that isn't the bulk of those studied, as noted in paragraph 10:

Rates were highest for those ages 15 to 19 (27.94 per 100,000.)

Prime no-goodnik age indeed, and two of those five years in that span are old enough to be charged as adults without any special actions by the prosecutor because under the law, THEY ARE ADULTS, NOT CHILDREN.

You can see how well-crafted this study and article is to come to a biased conclusion now can't you?

Indeed, the study shows you're most likely to be a hospitalized "child" victim of a shooting if you're a black male in the 15-19 age range as result of being a victim of an assault, not an accident.

The study detailed a significant racial gap: Black children and adolescents comprised 47% of all hospitalizations, 54% of hospitalizations resulting from assaults, 36% from unintentional injuries and 54% from undetermined causes.

You can draw your own conclusions as to where said teens were and what they were doing at the time, as the study surely does not...

Luckily for the study, no analysis of poverty or indeed criminal activity on the part of those shot was considered:

Noting the significantly higher poverty rate for young black males compared with young white males, Sege says the data did not allow researchers to "separate the effects of poverty from the effects of race."

Nor did the data indicate what types of guns were used or where the injury occurred.

So it's biased stats full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, all the way down.

What is the first conclusion the authors of the study come to? That they need more funding, of course

The findings emphasize "the need for funding for public health research to find the best way to reduce children's access to firearms," he says.

That's findings-speak for "Don't confuse us with the facts, or ask us to look at what the fact sactually might mean, just give us more money so we can fund scientifically sounding junk to press for gun bans."

His second conclusion, that flies in the face of the studies admission that "Nor did the data indicate ..... where the injury occurred." is even more unsupported:

In the absence of such research, Sege says, the best advice is to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that "the safest home for children and teens is one without guns,"

Talk about your non-sequitur. The study by his own admission does not state where the shooting injury occurred, or what the "child" was doing. Indeed, it shows that most of the shootings were due to assaults not accidents, but he confidently states that the safest home is one without guns. What?

Allegedly, Pediatrics is a peer reviewed journal. Draw your own conclusions of the wisdom of the particular peer reviewers approving publishing this dreck as a scientific study rather than an advocacy hit-piece thinly veiled with misleading statistics.

In short yet another example of the peudo-medical establishment with an anti-gun agenda trying to jump on the ever popular funding gravy-train with anti-gun distorted studies. No Thanks.