By Salam Fatohi, NSSF

When you couple gun control advocates masquerading as academic researchers with a discredited gun violence “statistics” operation, you’re bound to get a defective “study” generated for the sole purpose of garnering anti-gun headlines. That’s exactly what just happened with that Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) and the “research” cobbled together and published with the attention-grabbing headline, Deer Hunting Season and Firearm Violence in US Rural Counties.

Disregard the fact that the “data” used in the study comes solely from the discredited Gun Violence Archive, that even the antigun The Trace has distanced themselves from. Forget that buried deep in the study the authors admit they “did not find a linear association between hunting licenses per capita and shootings.” Never mind that the authors also revealed that “The start of deer hunting season was associated will null effects on overall crime, as well as a reduction in alcohol-related arrest,” according to police data.

None of that mattered. The researchers set out to suggest America’s greatest pastime is “bad” and generate an anti-hunting headline they knew a sympathetic media would run with. And the media all too willingly complied.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The saying goes, “You get what you pay for.” And in this case, billionaire gun control bankrollers paid millions towards antigun research, including financially backing Princeton University’s research department that employs the JAMA study’s author, Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey.

They aren’t quite in the league of Michael Bloomberg but gun control billionaires John and Laura Arnold have a deep record of funding gun control efforts that match their anti-Second Amendment beliefs. That includes the Princeton study that was concocted by a known gun control activist researcher using gun control activist data.

The study’s primary author, Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, ignored criminals who illegally obtain and misuse firearms to falsely imply that hunters who are some of the most responsible and safest gun owners anywhere are committing crime during hunting season.

“Sharkey’s study is a twofer for the gun ban industry. It manages to denigrate both hunting and gun ownership,” Lee Williams writes in Shooting News Weekly.

Let Me Count the Flaws

After Sharkey published his “deer hunters cause gun violence” study, the mainstream media ran with headline. Forbes published a rehash of it. So did NBC News. CBS did too. A quick Google search shows dozens of local news outlets repackaged and republished the study.

Not only did the author “not find a linear association between hunting licenses per capita and shootings” – a direct quote from Page 5 of the study – he moved right along to then demonize deer hunters for the same idea.

“We did find, however, that the strongest association between deer hunting season and total shootings was in states with the highest number of hunters relative to the population (Page 5),” Sharkey’s report states.

Sharkey admits, however, another flaw in his own study that further clouds the murky data used. “Due to the absence of a centralized source for information on deer hunting season (Page 2),” Sharkey cobbled together rough timelines and guesses to use as his guideposts. As mentioned previously, Gun Violence Archive (Sharkey’s main data source) is unreliable, error ridden and biased against firearm ownership.

Sharkey also notes the Gun Violence Archive data found an increase in shootings after the start of deer hunting season that involve handguns, rather than the long guns hunters use.

Sharkey’s study also incorrectly states that the association of deer hunting season with shootings was most pronounced in states with the greatest number of hunting license per capita while also noting on the prior page that he “did not find a linear association between hunting licenses per capita and shootings” and that police data shows “the start of deer hunting season was associated will null effects on overall crime.”

Another dubious claim is that “Research on the prevalence of hunting with firearms show that participation is extremely low (and often not legal) in counties that are a part of or near metropolitan areas and increases substantially in sparsely populated areas outside of central cities and suburbs.”

There are patterns of increases in shootings in Chicago around holidays like July Fourth and yet there is no hunting season nor hunters in the Windy City at that time. What they do have are gangs, illegally-obtained firearms, including illegally-modified guns, no bail policies, prosecutors who won’t prosecute and so many gun control laws it is next to impossible to exercise Second Amendment rights.

Critical Counter Argument

Deeply flawed, agenda-driven studies like the Sharkey JAMA report are, sadly, far too common. There is plenty of money in academia will take grant funding pursue junk science to demonize hunters and push gun control agenda. The left’s “playbook” is old – study it, demonize it, then ban it.

Hunters – and all law-abiding gun owners – must stay vigilant and vote to stop gun control legislators who will use studies like Sharkey’s to push further restrictions on Second Amendment rights on law-abiding citizens while ignoring criminals who break the law. That includes the more than 10 million hunters who are not yet registered to vote on Nov. 5. They need to #GUNVOTE so they don’t risk their rights.