The public health gun prohibition movement has long used news of tragic deaths to stir up anti-gun sentiment. In this report from NBCNews.com, researchers from the anti-gun Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health announce their discovery that more than 90 percent of police officers who are murdered are killed with guns. Actually, the NBCNews.com article reads “killed by guns,” indicating the writer’s irrational fears around guns (see my May 29 entry on guns as evil talismans). Having pumped up her readers’ emotions with the thought of police officers being murdered, NBCNews.com writer Maggie Fox hammers away at the need to restore federal funding for research on prevention of “firearm violence.” Mainstream media, long-time cheerleaders for gun control, have been using “stories” like this for years to push for gun control.
The researchers profess innocence:
“David Swedler at Johns Hopkins University’s school of public health and Center for Injury Research and Policy, says he didn’t mean to wade into a political debate.
‘We approached this from an occupational health and occupational safety standpoint,’ Swedler said in a telephone interview. ‘We are looking to inform law enforcement officers about their workplace safety information, what hazards they face. We weren’t looking to write a political paper at all.’
But political papers are the only thing Johns Hopkins public health researchers write when the subject is guns. Aside from not being a legitimate subject of study by medical researchers, police homicides have long been studied by the scientists properly qualified to study them—criminologists. As you can imagine, it’s no secret to police who the threats are. Their lives depend on knowing and neutralizing the lethal threats they face every day in their work. Their training includes learning how to recognize and deal with those dangers. The idea that medical researchers have much of value to teach them about police work is ridiculous at best. But this “study” does provide gun control advocates with yet another excuse to lobby for spending our tax dollars on junk science justifications for ever more gun control.