Fact checking the so-called “experts”

GUN CONTROL NZ

Gun Control NZ strongly supports the right of every New Zealander to make a submission to the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee on the Arms Legislation Bill. We also believe the Committee should hear a wide range of views though not everyone who wants to submit orally can do so, as there is limited time. We question why the Committee is using some of that valuable time to hear two overseas gun lobbyists masquerading as neutral academic experts. We have stopped listening to climate change denial “scientists” when debating climate change legislation and we should not be listening to their equivalent in the firearms debate.

Canadian Gary Mauser (along with Gary Kleck) is a favourite researcher of the North American gun lobby. Mauser has accepted NRA funding for some of his research. Mauser taught marketing at Simon Fraser University, alongside a distinguished criminology professor who wrote of one of his papers: “Mauser’s unpublished study is best understood as a political intervention. Mauser is a former American gun collector, target shooter, and gun enthusiast who strongly endorses the right to bear arms as an important community initiative.”

Mauser complained to newspapers about media attention focused on the 1996 Vernon Wedding Day massacre in which a man shot his estranged wife and eight of her family members. At that time, Mauser was President of the Barnet Rifle Club that signed off the perpetrator as an active member in good standing.

Some of his “research” is so shonky that it has been debunked by Snopes: a fact-checking website that validates and debunks myths, rumours and urban legends. Mauser wrote to the Select Committee about his “extensive study” with Don Kates on the relationship between gun ownership rates, and firearms homicide and suicide rates.

That “study” was published in the undergraduate Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. As Dr David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy and Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center pointed out: ‘The article appears in a publication, described as a “student law review for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.” It does not appear to be a peer-reviewed journal, or one that is searching for truth as opposed to presenting a certain world view. The paper itself is not a scientific article, but a polemic, making the claim that gun availability does not affect homicide or suicide. It does this by ignoring most of the scientific literature, and by making too many incorrect and illogical claims.’ The Trace also has a useful debunking of the “study”.

The Harvard School of Public Health has helpfully summarised the literature demonstrating the very strong correlations between more guns and more firearms homicides and suicides.

Mauser also made a number of claims about the Canadian gun register. Gun Control NZ undertook an extensive literature review on international experience with gun registers. Most of Mauser’s claims on the Canadian gun register are inconsistent with other evidence.

Samara McPhedran is the former chair of the International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting (WiSH) and a strong opponent of Australian gun laws. She doesn’t reveal any of this background in her submission, choosing instead to simply present herself as a neutral academic expert talking about the evidence.

Some of McPhedran’s own research on the effects of gun laws in Australia has been thoroughly debunked by Dr Simon Chapman, AO, Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney, Dr David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy, and Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University and others. In a press release in 2006, Simon Chapman described one of Dr McPhedran’s papers as bordering on academic dishonesty.

In her written submission to the Select Committee, Dr McPhedran makes the egregious claim that there is no connection between the Australian law changes and the pattern of mass shootings in Australia. This is what the data shows happened to the pattern of mass shootings in Australia after 1996:

The pattern is very visually striking and it is backed up by robust statistical analysis. In 2016, Simon Chapman and two others, published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association where they noted that 20 years on from their gun law reforms, Australia had not had a single mass shooting. In the 18 years up to and including the Port Arthur massacre, there’d been 13 shootings where five or more (not including the perpetrator) were killed. The New Yorker named that paper as one of five most notable medical research reports of 2016.

In response to that paper, McPhedran said: “It is possible that the concentration of incidents in one decade was a statistical anomaly. Mass shootings are rare events, and the long gap between incidents post-1996 may simply reflect a return to a more 'normal' state of affairs, similar to the years before 1987.”

So Simon Chapman and colleagues published another paper in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, where they tested this “rare events are still rare” criticism. 

They concluded that the probability of a 22-year absence of mass shootings following the pattern of 13 mass shootings in the previous 18 years was about 1 in 200,000. Those odds are exceptionally rare (though about twice as good as winning first division Lotto off a $7 ticket, which is 1 in 383,000).

They estimated that 16 mass shootings were prevented by the changes in gun laws in Australia. That’s at least 80 lives saved from mass shootings alone, never mind the reductions in gun-related homicides, suicides and injuries.

Now McPhedran claims that the mass shootings between 1987 and 1996 are just an inexplicable anomaly and that there has simply been a return to the pre-1987 world of very few mass shootings. She ignores the fact that prior to the 1980s there were very few military style semi-automatic weapons owned by the general public and even claims the opposite. While we haven’t examined the evidence in Australia (and McPhedran only makes an unsupported assertion) there is evidence that this was the case in New Zealand.

Many of Mauser and McPhedran’s positions have been thoroughly discredited. We don’t understand why the Select Committee is wasting its time listening to these so-called experts. All they are doing is repeating the gun lobby myths that more guns are associated with less crime and that the Australian gun law reforms had no impact on mass shootings.

 This post was amended on 30 March 2021. A previous version of the post incorrectly implied that the Barnet Rifle Club was responsible for issuing pistol licenses in Canada.