I’ve talked before about Academia.edu and its repository of gun “studies,” primarily to marvel that research papers would cite someone who never let school get in the way of his education. Anyway, I get daily email update notifications of uploaded papers, and they just did one from 2020 titled “Evaluating the Impact of Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) Initiative within the City of Rochester.”
Me, my eyes glaze over with eggheadspeak and charts (sorry, Dr. Lott, the ADD kicks in and I go into daydream mode), so I always skip to the conclusion, where we find, totally unsurprisingly (and I could have saved this guy a lot of work and just told him) “call-in meetings, custom notification, and GIVE orientation meetings” don’t address the real problem of Democrat collectivist policies creating a crime culture petri dish.
He admits as much, though tries to save face and convince his evaluators he’s still a team player:
While this quasi-experiment might not have been definitive in answering the question of if the program had a particular influence on gun violence incidents based on strategies and activities implemented, the evidence still leads to possible benefits of the GIVE initiative within the city of Rochester.
Homicides dropping from 73 to 57 in one year do not a trend make, and unless and until the whole elephant in the room is addressed, claiming credit for fluctuations is a game played by fools and frauds.
